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Updated: 7 hours ago

Made in Maine: Gathering around a fire is the aim of a Gorham manufacturer

Photo / Tim Greenway Mikhail Batankeviel paints wood stoves at Jøtul USA Inc. The Gorham-based manufacturer makes wood-burning and gas-fueled stoves.
By Peter Van Allen

Jøtul USA Inc., a Gorham-based division of a Norwegian company, was founded in 1980. 

Its catalog includes some 84 variations of stoves. Its sales are split 50/50 between wood-burning stoves and gas-burning (natural gas or, with a quick conversion, propane). The Gorham Industrial Park site produces 38 to 42 stoves a day, says Bret Watson, who is president of Jøtul USA.

The Gorham site is Jøtul’s North American headquarters, with 85% of sales in the U.S. and the remaining 15% in Canada. The stoves are sold through a network that includes 1,100 wholesale or retail operations, including about 15 retailers in Maine. Its largest customer is Monsma Marketing, a Grand Rapids, Mich.-based distributor, but most of its customers are smaller, independent retailers.

While the U.S. operation started out as an importer of the Norwegian product, today the stoves are built entirely in Gorham, where the company has 75 employees (of which 45 are on the manufacturing side). 

Sheets of steel are brought in from a New Hampshire factory, and many other components are sourced from specialty manufacturers. Steel-cutting CNC machines cut out sections from the sheets, while other machines are dedicated to bending the steel for specific parts. 

A key component is cast iron, and Watson says the best cast iron for the stoves comes from Norway. In a good year, Jøtul USA imports 150 shipping containers of cast iron through the Port of Portland. The cast iron is trucked to a port in Sweden, where it is shipped to Iceland and eventually brought over on an Eimskip container ship to Portland. The cast iron goes through an extensive shaping process in the Gorham plant’s “cast prep” department — grinding, drilling and tapping, gasketing and kitting to the assembly line. 

“It’s very physical work,” Watson says. 

The Gorham plant, formerly a Sebago shoe factory, is 120,000 square feet. It’s set up for assembly, with raw materials at one end, the assembly line in the middle, with the shipping end stacked high with the finished product — packed on pallets made from locally sourced Ware-Butler lumber and wrapped in plastic so customers can spot any damage from shipping.

In 2017, Jøtul shifted the assembly process to a system developed by Toyota that incorporates “lean” manufacturing techniques and helps spot assembly-line slowdowns and safety or maintenance issues. 

“We have the Toyota coaches in here four times a year, for a week at a time,” says Watson. 

In many ways, it’s an old-school system. While assembly operators may have a monitor at their workstation, there are no laptops or spreadsheets on the line. The rate of production, safety and maintenance issues and other data is hand-written on whiteboards and bulletin boards throughout the building. Employees have 15-minute morning meetings to get briefings.

Workers are on one 10-hour shift a day, with production scheduled Monday through Thursday. 

Friday is reserved for overtime work, though that has settled down from during the pandemic, when more people were at home “nesting.”

Jøtul USA’s best-selling product is the GF-370, a gas-burning stove that sells 1,000 units a year and costs $5,000. As Watson indicates, that does not include installation.

Many new homes are built with gas stoves and the sleek-looking GF-370 is a nice touch in a luxury home.

“This is the BMW or Lexus of gas stoves,” Watson says.

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