Brushfire Smoke BBQ

BBQ Experts to Bring Products to Consumers at Home

Challenge

Brushfire Smoke is a spin-off restaurant and catering company from Niagara Oast House Brewers. Brushfire embraces a reverence for traditional BBQ techniques with a simultaneous desire to break away from these. Brushfire has a full-service restaurant and patio that serves both lunch and dinner. In conjunction with Oast, they strive to utilize all stages of the brewing process into their recipes – from wort syrup to drizzle over desserts, using the spent grains in breads, and crumbles, and of course, the beer throughout sauces, brines and marinades. Brushfire wanted to find a way to make some of their creations more widely available for consumers at home, so they came to the CFWI Innovation Centre’s business and food science teams for assistance.

Solution

The business portion of the project covered an environmental scan, examining consumer food trends and buying habits, competitive analysis, examining price, promotion, place and product framework of competitors, and market segmentation, identifying potential consumer markets. The food science portion of this project involved everything from formula optimization to regulatory and scale-up. Branding is now complete and Brushfire Smoke looks forward to launching products on shelves in the near future.