The pair got talking and by the end of the second month a new company had been formed and a DTI SMART award of £40,000 quickly followed to begin the R&D. In total 19 burners went to Central America to help ancient coffee mills dry their coffee for export using their coffee husk waste instead of the forest lumber they were using. Bioflame's equipment is now responsible for the conservation of 60,000m3 of rainforest every year - equivalent to half of the wood felled in Yorkshire every year.
The trio were joined in 2004 by FD John Wright who was asked after a trip to 24hr Le Mans if he knew a good FD. John brought further investment and the missing financial cornerstone to the business.
In the UK the system has been developed to be fully compliant with all relevant legislation having established 3 heat only plants (one burns food waste, one burns agricultural production waste and the other burns railway sleeper waste). The client for the sleeper burner was so impressed that he invested in the business in 2006 and has now ordered a 2.5 mega watt per hour full electrical plant to supply electrical energy to the equivalent of over 6000 homes which will be delivered by March 2009. Bioflame has built a £2.5m demonstration power station running on local wood waste at it's base within the North Yorkshire National Park with the help of FEY and Yorkshire Forward. This site is fully permissioned and exporting electricity to the National Grid. The company has secured bank senior debt funding to build it's first joint venture electrical station at a waste site in Lincolshire which will be ready in Q4 2008