Negative Forno Bravo Reviews about BrickWood on the Forno Bravo Forum

I’m currently doing my homework on pizza ovens as my wife and I are planning on building an outdoor wood fired pizza oven this spring.

I’ve been on the Forno Bravo forum a couple of times and noticed you have 3 or 4 negative reviews from the same people. I’m just chalking this up to Forno Bravo being a competitor and having their “loyal” customers posting negative comments (or could it be Forno Bravo employees posting them under fake accounts?). Have you seen the comments?

Next question. I’d like to build a pizza oven like the Hollenbeck Oven you have on your Mattone Barile Gallery page, can you send me the directions for this oven?

Jefferson Brown
Round Rock, TX

Good morning Jefferson -

Yes, we have seen the comments on Forno Bravo’s website and yes, they are posted by loyal Forno Bravo customers. It’s quite easy to find out who they are with a couple of clicks of the mouse.

One of the commenters is a Forno customer that works for a brick and block dealer in the great state of Texas that we removed from our network of BrickWood Ovens Authorized Dealers a few years ago. The other is a landscape contractor that builds overpriced pizza ovens in the New England territory. He also enjoys blogging and spewing the Latin phrase “Caveat Emptor” in all of his posts. He really has it out for us! He can spin a post about non-clumping kitty litter on a cat forum into an anti-BrickWood Ovens rant. We addressed their false accusations years ago. In fact, a couple of ovens they claim are BrickWood Ovens aren’t even our ovens at all! To make matters worse, there are moderators on other forums that simply delete or ban anyone with a positive comment about their BrickWood Oven.

I have personally reached out to Forno Bravo on multiple occasions to inquire about their continued promotion of these defamatory and slanderous accusations of BrickWood Ovens and our products. I tried by phone, but they hung-up on me. So I created an account on their forum and responded to a couple of the negative posts. I didn’t promote BrickWood Ovens in any fashion, I just simply addressed the negative comments in a professional manner but my post was immediately deleted and I was “Banned for Life” within minutes of posting a rebuttal. Several of our customers have stated they too were banned for life after pointing out the fact they were posting false and libel information.

Now, and this is the truly ironic part of the reply to your email, Forno Bravo has no problem hosting negative reviews about other brands (we’re not the only brand targeted on their forum), but they apparently have several “product quality complaints” and “dissatisfied customers” of their own which is clearly evident by simply looking at the Forno Bravo Sales Position Job Opening job posting. Forno Bravo has even gone as far as to troll our Amazon listings and leave false / libel “reviews” of our products while logged into their Forno Bravo Amazon Account and they plugged their website… Classy!

But let’s talk about REAL BrickWood Ovens Reviews! BrickWood Ovens uses an independent 3rd party rating service called Yotpo. A few months after buying a BrickWood Oven, our customers receive an email from Yotpo inquiring about their BrickWood Ovens purchase and asks them to rate their BrickWood Oven and to provide any comments that they might have about their purchase… positive OR negative. We are PROUD to say that we have a 4.89 out of 5 stars from over 500 customers – ACTUAL customers of BrickWood Ovens providing unbiased and unaltered reviews! To date, I have yet to see one negative review about BrickWood Ovens from a BrickWood Ovens customer and I have yet to see one email or receive one phone call from an upset customer. I personally answer all the emails and I personally answer our phones. When you reach-out to BrickWood Ovens, you are reaching the person-in-charge the first time – every time!

BrickWood Ovens has fantastic relationships with all the other pre-manufactured pizza oven brands and we respect them immensely. I have had the pleasure of working with Bill Paschen (former president of Chicago Brick Oven) in the past and we shared a fantastic wood-fired pizza at a tradeshow in Orlando. We also hold Mugnaini wood-fired ovens with the highest regard. They are the leading pre-manufactured pizza oven brands in America and they craft one of the highest quality pre-manufactured ovens we have ever used.

Now ask yourself, do you really want to work with a company that feels the continued need to put-down other brands on their forum? Or do you want to work with one of America’s leading brands of wood fired ovens like BrickWood Ovens, Chicago Brick Oven or Mugnaini? I think the choice is pretty clear.

To answer the second part of your question, the beautiful Hollenbeck Oven is made with the Mattone Barile Grande - Package 3. That kit includes the pizza oven foam form, the door, exhaust kit, ceramic fiber blanket and the 3-pc cooking accessory set. We also include a very detailed set on installation instruction and a materials list, but this particular oven was truly a Hollenbeck original. But all is not lost – every oven pictured on the BrickWood Ovens Photo & Video Gallery is linked to each customers gallery page which showcases the construction process of that particular oven. While we don’t have instructions on how to build the Hollenbeck Oven, you can click on their gallery page and view the numerous photos of that oven in various stages of construction (and possibly steal some ideas when building your oven).

Thank you for your question Jefferson!

Kevin


Jefferson,

Good to see someone close building an oven as well… I live in south Austin and just finished ours - still have a few things to put in place, then I plan on submitting photos to Brickwood…Below is a sneak peak at ours… Let me know if you need any material recommendations - I can tell you who I went with in Austin. Also - I overshot how many firebricks I needed and have some left in case you would like to make an offer on them

Thanks - Matt

I have to jump in on this topic. I’ve been intrigued by wood fired ovens for years, I also was looking into adding an oven to our mobile food business so I did some research on brick ovens and know a couple of people who have them (mobile units from other suppliers). Every person I spoke with told me that if I wanted a wood fired oven I’d have to pay what they did AND a couple actually said it’d have to be imported from Italy to be any good. Most of them paid several thousand dollars for a smallish round pizza oven which (according to them) was the ONLY design that could/would work. I now look at them as “oven snobs”.

Well, I couldn’t convince the wife to shell out several grand for a backyard oven that I wanted to start with to gain experience AND have one always available at home. So, off to the internet to see what I could come up with that would:
A. Work well
B. Is cost efficient
C. Looked good
D. Wasn’t made of corn cobs or self made bricks / mud
E. Is cost efficient as it had to pass by the “COO” (did I mention that before?).

After long debate I settled on a Barile Grande and we were off to the races! After it was built I was having issues with proper heating so I scoured other oven sites to see what might be the issue ( I chose to ignore the advice I’d gotten on there). I ran into all sorts of “helpful” advice from “you got cheated” to “tear it down and start over with XXXX design by our manufacturer” or my favorite “it’s a poor design and not technically correct… it will never work so get rid of it and by this oven for a several grand”.

So, after feeling totally bummed and cheated I decided I’d spent way too much time and effort building this oven AND there were too many visible success stories to give up on it. I came back here, read through all the stuff again and sent an email or two to the company and tried again.

Well, it turns out that the oven does work very, very well though I’ve still got some kinks to work out which, in my opinion are completely my fault due to lack of time to run it frequently enough to figure it all out. Eventually I’ll just either break down and go to a class or be able to go to the Pizza Expo seminars in Las Vegas.

One thing I did learn is bigger is NOT always better. The Barile Grande is/was wayyyyy larger than I honestly needed but that wasn’t apparent until after I got the form. The running joke is I could always switch over to a crematorium for extra income LOL. I guess go big or go home right?

The bottom line is yes, there are detractors out there just like there are with every other product on earth. Chevy is better than Ford or vise versa and one has to buy a Caddy to have a smooth ride but you DON’T have to spend thousands to have a great pizza / bread / roasting oven!

To that I say “bollocks”, this oven works very well, it’s just as good as the person operating it.

  • TwoDips
1 Like

Thank you for the detailed review TwoDips! We know you time is valuable and truly appreciate your value-added feedback! If you ever have any questions about your oven, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at anytime!

Kevin