Our Story

Manchester Wood Pellets

Manchester Wood Pellets’ manufacturing facility in Southern New England was previously the home of the Central Connecticut Cooperative Farmers Association, which employed over 70 people and manufactured animal feed products for over 78 years.

“Apel’s Opera House”

In 2016, the iconic feed mill closed due to lower sales volumes associated with declining agricultural production in the state. The founders of Manchester Wood Pellets saw an opportunity to repurpose the feed mill into a wood pellet manufacturing facility.

Manchester Wood Pellets’ corporate office is located in a historic brick building built by Bernard Apel. Mr. Apel immigrated to the United States from a recently unified Germany in the nineteenth century and built the brick building we currently occupy in 1877. Until 1942, the building housed a mercantile showroom, which Mr. Apel had expanded to include a wide variety of products, from carpets, wallpaper and curtains, to crockery, lamps, clocks, stoves and pianos. The upper floors of the building housed a large theater called “Apel’s Opera House”. A fire gutted the opera house in 1899. Apel rebuilt, but did not reconstruct the original audience gallery.

Our Team

The Manchester Wood pellets team acquired the property and subsequently converted the former animal feed mill into a barbecue wood pellet manufacturing facility. We are proud to create local manufacturing and forestry jobs, which is helping to reinvigorate our local economy and strengthen our community. When you buy Manchester Wood Pellets, you’re not just buying the best wood pellets money can buy – you’re also helping some local folks get back to work.

Our Mission

The Manchester Wood Pellets team lives for good barbecue and we’re on a mission to provide a superior barbecue wood pellet made only from the finest, locally-sourced natural ingredients. We know that good barbecue requires the right fuel. That’s why we’ve developed a new kind of super-premium wood pellet – one that’s made entirely from green hardwood chips sourced directly from local forests, has the highest bulk density and ultra-low ash content. Our forestry partners carefully select the finest oak, maple, hickory and cherry timber for processing at our plant.

The Best Barbecue Wood Pellets Money Can Buy

Many high-volume wood pellet manufacturers use low-cost sawmill waste materials, which can result in poor flavor outcomes. We’re a small-batch pellet mill, partnered with local New England foresters who supply us with 100% natural wood chips – directly from nature. When you cook with Manchester Barbecue Pellets, you can rest assured that our product is the best cooking pellet money can buy. Our barbecue wood pellets are super-premium because we exclusively use 100% natural green wood chips as our raw material and utilize a proprietary manufacturing process. We never use artificial fragrance oils of any kind. With Manchester Barbecue Pellets, you get perfect natural smoke flavor. Our manufacturing process gives you pellets with superior wood aromatics. A number of barbecue restaurants use our wood pellets for smoking, because they deliver smoke flavor that is very close to the results a Pitmaster gets from using a traditional log burner.

Focused on SUSTAINABILITY

In addition to making the finest barbecue wood pellets money can buy, we’re also focused on protecting our environment, which means that we only use wood waste from sustainable forestry operations. In addition, we’re installing solar panels on our buildings to reduce the carbon footprint of our manufacturing process.