“I used to be embarrassed to say I sold firewood,” Javier Sanchez said. He and his father, Joel, own and operate Chief Firewood, in Smithville, an hour southeast of Austin, and supply wood to restaurants and barbecue joints as far away as Houston and Dallas. Sanchez grew up in the business his father founded in 1990, but he saw it as a last resort when he went searching for a career of his own.
He was constructing metal buildings with his cousin when a chance conversation with a friend changed his mind. The friend asked why Sanchez was wasting his time working for someone else when he could be preparing to take over an established family business. “Those words hit me like a ton of bricks,” Sanchez said, and he asked his father about coming back into the fold. That’s where he has been since 2013.
In late 2021, Sanchez was delivering a load of a split post oak wood to Terry Black’s Barbecue in Austin. Co-owner Michael Black was there to receive it, and he told Sanchez about the new Texas Monthly Top 50 barbecue list that had just been released. Black named some barbecue joints on the list, and Sanchez realized he supplied a whole lot of them. “He said, ‘You need to brand your company,’ ” Sanchez recalled. At the time, Chief Firewood didn’t even have a website. All of its new clients were gained by word of mouth. That was when Sanchez got to work.
“Either get with the times, or get left behind,” Sanchez said of his new outlook. He envisioned a YouTube page with videos from his pitmaster customers, which launched a year later. Sanchez created social media accounts for the business, hired someone to build the Chief Firewood website, and designed a metal badge with the company’s logo and website to go on every rack of wood stored in some of the state’s best pit rooms.
Sanchez had already been making waves in the business. When Joel started the company, Chief Firewood was the middleman. Joel hauled semitrailer loads of logs to woodyards that split, stacked, and sold the wood to the public. Sanchez urged his father to let him seek out some restaurant customers in Austin that would buy split wood directly from Chief Firewood. He made cold calls in his new Chief Firewood work shirts, which were embroidered with the company logo. “A lot of them called me back, and the word of mouth just took off,” said Sanchez. One of those early customers was Franklin Barbecue, in Austin, which would soon become a great reference in courting prospective customers. “We just fell into the barbecue boom at the perfect time,” Sanchez said.
Back then, Sanchez delivered loose logs that needed to be unloaded and stacked by hand. He convinced his father to invest in pallet jacks and delivery trucks with liftgates. They welded together wheeled steel cages for wood racks large enough to hold a half cord of wood each. (A cord equals 128 cubic feet of firewood, or around six hundred to eight hundred logs.) Deliveries were made easier by just rolling a few of those racks into place. The Sanchezes leave the racks behind and pick up the empties with each new delivery. Sanchez figures they’ve built 550 racks in all, at a cost of $800 each.
Most of the wood Chief Firewood supplies is post oak, which is by far the most popular smoking wood in Central Texas. Most of Sanchez’s deliveries are made in Austin, to the likes of Franklin Barbecue, Moreno Barbecue, and Terry Black’s Barbecue. Three of the four barbecue joints to receive a Michelin star this week—InterStellar BBQ, La Barbecue, and LeRoy and Lewis Barbecue, all in Austin—are customers. Sanchez also delivers post oak to the legendary Louie Mueller Barbecue, in Taylor; to 2M Smokehouse, in San Antonio; and to Truth Barbeque, in Houston. A few of his customers prefer other hardwoods, such as pecan (Distant Relatives, in Austin) and mesquite (the newly opened Black Gold, also in Austin).
I spoke with Sanchez at the Texas Monthly BBQ Fest in Lockhart a couple weeks back. Chief Firewood was there as a sponsor, providing wood to pitmasters who needed it, and Sanchez stood at a table in front of several piles of split oak, explaining the seasoning process to inquisitive passersby. He also explained the difference between live trees and post oaks he has harvested over the last decade that are known as standing dead trees. Their root systems were stressed from the severe drought conditions that persisted between 2011 and 2015 in Central Texas, where post oak trees thrive. The trees died from the roots up, but many remained standing without rotting.
Texas A&M noted the rapid decline of post oak trees in Texas in a 2016 report about the effects of the drought. The decline was a boon for those selling firewood, as farmers and ranchers would ask for their services to remove dead trees. It also made for a more environmentally friendly wood supply. Sanchez said the standing dead post oaks from that drought aren’t as easy to find these days in “the motherland of post oak,” as he describes the roughly forty-mile radius around Smithville where the company harvests trees. “You could just drive up and down the highway where we’re from in the country, and you would see places with a ton of dead trees. Now you don’t see them anymore,” he said.
Instead, Chief Firewood now gets the majority of its post oak supply from a big network of farmers, ranchers, and developers. Sanchez said that when any of them needs land cleared, “they call us, versus paying someone else to come out and cut the trees down.” Snailbrook, the company town Elon Musk is building near Bastrop, recently needed seven hundred acres of land cleared for what Sanchez was told was an emergency runway and called Sanchez to take out all the post oak.
While the supply may still be there, harvesting green wood has its challenges compared to taking the once prevalent dead trees. “They’re already dead, so they’re further along in the seasoning process when we cut them,” Sanchez said, which means Chief Firewood can sell the wood in three or four months. Post oak from a live tree takes a year to be properly seasoned after the tree is cut down. “You have your investment tied up,” Sanchez explained, which also means the business needs more land for storing the wood it’s seasoning.
These days, Chief Firewood sells about four hundred cords of wood per month. Some of the biggest post oak trees provide two cords of wood each, but Sanchez said the average tree yields about a half cord. That means Chief Firewood is sawing and splitting roughly 9,600 trees per year. And, for a fee, it’ll saw a tree to any length you’d like, remove the bark, and create thinner pieces using a triple-split process that requires additional handling. “We have to give them what they want,” Sanchez said. “We have to cater to the customer.” Just know that the job will be done cleanly. Sanchez said he finds poorly cut and split wood to be offensive.
When Sanchez was growing up, his image of a person selling firewood was that of a redneck hauling a heap of mismatched wood pieces in the back of a beat-up pickup truck. The term Sanchez heard used to describe such sellers was “cedar choppers.” He shied away from the firewood business because he didn’t want to be called a cedar chopper. Now people call him Chief. It’s a nickname his father earned in the oil fields that stuck with him when it came time to name the business. Sanchez was once embarrassed to sell firewood, but, he said, “Now I take a sense of pride in it when people call me Chief.”
