Lytefire is not low tech. It is unique. And it is not for activism: Clarification needed in France

Lytefire is unique. It is for workers, entrepreneurs, and artisans from the South and made possible with the support of the humanitarian sector and industrial sponsors.

Lytefire is not open source and it is not low tech.

We do not like labels. We simply do our work and our users create the impact. That’s it.

This clarification is important in France where we see our work mispresented, even after several attempts to ask for clarity. We like clarity. It’s the basis for trust. So we already clarified on this but it seems, more clarity is even needed. Here we go.

At the beginning some of us were idealists, some even activists. Some founders believed that only radical actions can make change. Others believed only in hard work, field results and impact. These are the ones running Lytefire today.

Our path is the one of impact entrepreneurship, meaning that our work itself is bringing to society the answers we have created to the problem(s) we wanted to solve. It is easy to understand that for us, as a company, what matters is not the dissemination of proofs of concept or MVP but the sale of a product that keeps its promises and makes its users happy.

Activism (or “militantisme” in French) isn’t like that. Activism takes a few brilliant ideas that illustrate solutions, and then speaks loud to gain supporters. The goal is to propose new ideas, to inspire new ways of thinking, so that solutions can emerge. So here we are going to clarify something about one such type of activism: Engineer activism.

We have the utmost respect for any person and organization truly motivated by positive change in this world and actually doing things for more social justice, but activism is something different.

At Lytefire, the problem we wanted to solve with the support of international NGOs and other stakeholders is poverty, and especially the lack of access to a powerful source of clean energy for millions of women, farmers and micro-entrepreneurs in Africa. Not to provide people with a solar box to cook one meal at a time, not to provide 2 photovoltaic panels to do the homeworks at night, which are already great to raise living standards, but in order to provide a powerful clean energy source to be used as much as possible to create value, money, and sustainable jobs.

13 years later the mission is accomplished and Lytefire’s impact is 3 times what we first thought.

Since 2012, Lytefire has developed a new and robust model based on simple and powerful technology, very well suited to our users in the Southern and sunny countries, be it a community, artisans or a school canteen’s chef. We are selling Lytefire PRO with hybrid energy made in Kenya. And we also offer training for TVET programs, vocational schools and capacity building programs. On top of this, we created several high-tech models with CNC manufacturing and automatic tracking, and we continue to do so. In parallel, from time to time we have sold construction guides for DIY enthusiasts in the EU.

This is what we do, with a unique business model and with shareholders who have accepted to support a business primarily dedicated to humanitarian impact and solving climate change.

Clarification: The source of the storytelling

With that in mind, it’s no longer acceptable to stand by and hear what’s being disseminated in France about Lytefire in the conferences given by Loïc Pérochon and Arnaud Crétot. At this point we need to provide some perspective on what’s been happening in France over the last few years. With respect to the rest of our activities, this is minor but we are tired of this situation and we hope this post will bring clarity to the stakeholders.

Arnaud Crétot was a co-founder, shareholder and CTO with us for a few years. During a tough year, we had to stop his contract and in order to keep engaging with Lytefire, he decided to learn about baking and eventually test Lytefire at home, in France. We encouraged his testing of solar baking in Normandy with a solar oven that Lytefire built and shipped to him from Switzerland. In 2020, he needed a bigger solar oven to support his budding bakery operation. An engineer friend of his, Loïc Pérochon, introduced him to a small metal working factory nearby.

This was the starting point of a burst of enthusiasm around commercializing Lytefire in the French market. Joined by an online “marketing resistant” expert, their group thought that they would revolutionize the French baking sector, by mentoring hundreds of artisans to adopt the solar oven. We allowed them to use our brand in France but they labelled our work “Low-tech” despite our multiple and clear attempts to explain that we were rejecting this label. The engineering group was finding much-needed purpose in their work on Lytefire, so much so, that our inputs were no longer valued. The factory owners then used the newly “low-tech” designated Lytefire to surf on the French “Low-tech wave” to attract financing. Then they offered us a transformation, where they wanted to create a holding where our “secondary” humanitarian activities could continue in a corner. We said No.

On the basis of a single proof of concept built around one prototyped solar oven, the newbie baker part of the group then wrote a book and dozens of media started to take interest in his great self-proclaimed success - which is real for him and nothing in this post aims to diminish all the work he accomplished. Along the way, everything we tried to explain in terms of the African impact of Lytefire was dismissed. We saw Lytefire’s innovative approach progressively being cancelled from their storytelling, things being twisted to fit the new story and we had to insist a lot for him to mention our brand with journalists and to tell the truth on his site.

Despite numerous attempts to slow things down and think things through, CPM Industrie’s factory owners kept going and they have marketed, built and sold less than 10 Lytefire Deluxe solar ovens over the first two years. The price was so excessive that we asked them to call it Lytefire “Deluxe” so we wouldn’t lose credibility in front of our international clients. A big prototype has also been made for Arnaud. And he proudly announced everywhere that 110 kg of solar baked bread could be made daily. And we all believed it. Yay.

After that, surfing on this buzz in Normandie, NeoLoco, CPM and the consultants joined forces to create La Belle Tech, and then the TELED methodology to adapt the industrial sector to the limitations of solar, a.k.a. intermittent energy. They got financial support from French agencies to create things related to low-tech, and proposed to organize the production around the limitation of intermittent solar energy, and received lots of recognition. According to them, they “invented” the professionalization of low-tech and the “distributed factory". And so we continued to watch them being invited everywhere in France, in the top-class management schools and engineer’s programs to spread their vision, which is to “professionalize Low-Tech” and create “distributed factories”. Smart.

The so-called French “success” story

Now since NeoLoco is the root of all this and claims to be a place of experiments, let’s get a closer look at this experiment. 4 years later, what do we really have in France around all this?

Deluxe solar baking at NeoLoco:
NeoLoco bakes only 30% with solar, the rest is wood.
110 kg of solar bread per day is an absolute maximum with the unique prototype in use there. And implies being next to the oven all day to track the sun. In terms of organization, it’s simply impossible for any other bakery.
Only one type of bread is baked, and it’s a farmer’s bread that is not to everyone’s taste but luckily there was no competition in the region so this is never mentioned as a limitation. According to them, it’s a success.
Clearly this version of Lytefire Deluxe isn’t a professional tool adapted to actual bakeries, the results aren’t good for regular bread and traditional baking production. What this group of people has done was to organize a test and draw conclusions way too quickly about it without listening to our feedback. Feedback which was based on experience coming from African users, yes, but was it less valuable?

Since then we spoke to several “real” French bakers who simply explained to us the way their working day is organized and why things happen like this and like that around and inside their ovens. This confirmed our initial intuition that Lytefire Deluxe in the French context cannot be considered a professional tool per se. All this buzz has been created by an activist bakery supported by activist engineers and activist customers getting interest from institutions in great need of creativity and fresh perspective, even if not realistic.

Can NeoLoco test be replicated?
With French bakeries we do not believe so and it hasn’t happened in the last 4 years. The tool must be adapted properly to its users. Change is hard. There are numerous factors preventing people from changing and, in the case of the solar bakery, it was impossible to ask the users to:
Invest more than 20k€ (or 30k€ for Arnaud’s big unit) to change their continuous energy source to an intermittent one
+ adapt their entire business model and practice to solar energy intermittence
+ limit their production to what is allowed by the tool (e.g. rustic bread only).

In the course of history we know that people adapt. And we’re not saying that bakers can’t adapt to all this, of course not. But such an adaptation is called survival and we are not there (yet) in Europe: Customers still ask for quality products solving their needs. Yet, this activist vision of a “solar bakery” is NeoLoco’s model and the intellectual foundation of the TELED approach created out of this experiment to advise bigger industry sectors.

Deluxe Solar roasting:
Here the results have been much more encouraging in the French context. This is where things could have really been interesting in France and still could be. We do not have much data about it in Africa but it has been tested several times. And so it seems that this is where the Lytefire can be a great tool and provide real income, opening a new sector to small-scale local food transformation in France.

NeoLoco makes most of its profit from their solar roasting activity because the solar roasted products are lasting longer than the bread, which allows better production planning when the activity is based on intermittent solar energy.

There are 2 other very interesting artisans in France: Du Soleil et des Graines, and Aurinko. We hope that researchers will contact us and these artisans to collect data and explore the economics of this solar activity (here).

Other Solar Artisans (les Artisans Solaires Nourriciers):
With DIY models, other artisans have started other interesting activities: One micro-brewery and food canning workshops organizers have started up. Here also the results seem also very interesting, but the Lytefire also has limitations in these contexts. We’ll keep following this development.

The consequences for us

The French buzz and the way it has been managed had direct consequences on our work. On our side, because the “new professional low tech solar oven” device had “Lytefire” in its name and is our "improved" design, we had to manage the delusion of the few Deluxe clients believing that they could run “a solar bakery” with the device, half of them reselling their ovens after a year or two. To understand better their bad experience, we had to confront their poor results with the ones communicated to us by Arnaud’s and try to get clarity from him. We also had to understand the needed improvements to serve the bakers (artisan and not), and sadly to turn down hundreds of prospects in this country.

Years after, in France we can still see our work constantly associated with the Low-tech movement which isn’t something we wished for and about which we have been clear from the start (here in 2020). But this storytelling has been so dominant that interns and students studying cases entirely based on the use of Lytefire don’t even reach us to understand its great performances in different contexts and the reasons for its limitations in the French one. Entire press articles and interviews have been elaborating on the “low-tech side of Lytefire” aka its simplicity, discarding completely the solidarity aspect of our work. Mistakes continue to be spread again and again by Low-Tech enthusiasts,as well as unauthorized tutorials. On the Low-tech Lab website, one can also find performances coming out of nowhere.

Another example of complete lack of rigor and proper contextualization can be found in a recent study, involving researchers from Technological University Dublin, Université de Mon, Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble, Université de Technologie de Troyes and Arts et Métiers Institute of Technology. It is called Lessons in Low-Tech: A Handbook for Sustainable Education and the very first low tech presented with a big picture is... Neoloco’s Lytefire oven.

None of these researchers had the idea of double checking what Lytefire is. It’s really hard to believe but it’s true.

Same storytelling with the association Vagabonds de l’énergie, founded by Arnaud and run by his friends. This association gets funding for events and pedagogical events where the Lytefire is showcased to people as a low-tech solution with no reference to its core mission. These activists are truly unbelievable. They claim that they care for the planet but they don’t even care about the designers of the equipment they’re using! They can’t listen, they can’t respect, they just go and we’re tired of this. Below is a picture of their Lytefire showcased at the Festval Chemins de Travers, in France, visited by 7000 people.

Sometimes, we have been invited to events by prestigious French institutions but not out of interest for our core work and unique business model rather than to discuss Low-tech! So not a great experience on our side.

After all this buzz, as a company, what were we supposed to answer to all the prospects interested in getting a Lytefire for their eco-village, their farm, their micro-baking activity? We adapted: we brought the DIY plans on sale again, we opened a forum to all the builders and we welcomed any French artisan willing to purchase a license with us to fabricate and sell at cheaper price. Which we did with 2 artisans, and now it’s just one and yes, Gregoire is a low tech guy but that is not the reason why we work with him.

Even if we do not recognize ourselves fully in these movements, we value very much all the work conducted by the Low-Tech and Open Source eco-systems. These groups are exploring new and interesting ways to create and spread different tools. Our cooperation with Grégoire and the Low-Tech Lab Grenoble is making us happy because even though our DNA is not open source and we do not want to be labelled as “low tech”, our difference is respected and clear avenues for collaboration have been defined. At the moment, if you are in France and if you wish to experiment something with a Lytefire, one artisan, who is also part of the Low-Tech movement, can build you a Lytefire at a reasonable price or help you build yours.

We believe that cooperation and dialogue with everyone are key because everybody can participate to the social change but this can work only with respect of all stakeholder’s.

Credits, Labels and Professionalism

All the French low-tech storytelling in relation to Lytefire is wrong and it is a problem because some people have been continuously using their experience with our design to promote their activities while spreading confusion and falsehoods about us. We cannot tolerate anymore the fact that Lytefire’s technology was initially created for Africa and this being misrepresent by La Belle Tech, NeoLoco, TELED and their followers who are all claming that they have professionalized this low-tech.

There are many examples of this falsehood over the last years and in this post we will focus only on recent ones.

In a conference given last winter in Le Dôme Centre Scientifique de Caen Normandie, Elise Hauters, CPM’s owner, talks with emotion about how she met with Arnaud and Loïc in 2020. She talks about CPM’s workers finding so much purpose in working on "a" solar oven at the time (here, at 34:35), never naming Lytefire and of course inserting this experience in the storytelling meant to ground her deep and long-time commitment with ecology and low tech. For sure this experience with the production of Lytefire Deluxe in a metal factory specialized in aeronotics helped them a lot to position themselves as eco-stakeholders in the region, with all the funding that came thanks to this first brick of storytelling.

From our point of view, CPM made some very questionable changes to our design given the user’s performance shared above with Lytefire Deluxe. Based on this and what has been presented above, isn’t it a bit presumptuous to claim what they have done with our oven is “to professionalize this low-tech”, as Loïc Pérochon states in this same conference?

At that point, when Lytefire Deluxe started to be sold by CPM in 2021, we had completed two years of work with Autodesk Foundation in their San Francisco research center and several pilots in East Africa. We delivered to international NGOs like World Vision and Plan International. Our units were fabricated by artisans and after that by an industrial Kenyan factory with quality control. Is it so that African artisans are considered “unprofessional” by these French “experts”? Is it so that the results and expertise we bring from Africa are non-existent? If our work has finally been “professionalized” by them, what exactly are we meant to think about our own work? And where exactly would they be without all the work accomplished by us.

The fact that we had indeed already industrialized and professionalized elsewhere what they call a “low tech” product is never ever mentioned!

Nor the fact that our tech was created for the Southern countries and that its adaptation to the French market was secondary to us.

This is important because usually the technologies comes from the North to the South and we propose something a little bit different for once as we are trying to redefine the concept of humanitarian aid.

And the fact that we have been (and still are to our knowledge) the first clean energy company ever allowing access to a device through several entry points corresponding to different technical levels and contexts is also discarded:
– DIYers purchasing our construction manual to build the most basic version,
– Local and international NGOs purchasing ready made Lytefire units manufactured industrially
– Special projects commissioning us for high-tech developments.

Another example in this same conference, Loïc Pérochon states that:

"La Belle Tech is a fairly young company, being just over 2 years old. The 5 founding members met back in 2020 when we industrialized a low-tech product which is the one you see here, a solar concentration oven, a Lytefire, a solar concentration oven used by Arnaud Crétot, founder of Neoloco. (...) When he launched his business, he first had a self-built one because there were no solar concentration oven on the market. He quickly realized that it had its limits for a professional activity (...) and so we thought that we were going to industrialize this furnace to make it professional. And we had just professionalized a low-tech product (...) We quickly said to ourselves that we had to do the same with other low-tech products because this object itself is relatively of little interest." (here, starting at 19:30).

Excuse me? No solar concentration oven on the market at that time? And this object is of little interest?

What about the small ovens sold by Solar Brother, Sun Oven or GoSun, or the bigger one from Villager Sun Oven? What about the 4 millions small solar cookers and small ovens distributed by Solar Cooker International? And what about all the handcrafted solar ovens Lytefire already sold, installed and in use?

To enhance this fairy tale, Arnaud is also misrepresenting his role in our company everywhere. For example, in a conference with APCC (Association des Professionnels en Climat Energie et Environnement), he showed a huge Lytefire prototype made in India (picture below) as if he was part of this "big" project. The truth is that other team members were working on this at Mr Desai’s Gandhian factory and the prototype was already completed when Arnaud visited. At that time, his contribution was a series of long discussions on the factory’s roof where our first prototype of that size was standing. Arnaud simply used the footage and concepts he captured to support his documentary film about sustainable energy solutions.

Arnaud Crétot took a lot of inspiration from us (at the time, when he visited India, in 2010, before the creation of our company, all the work was done by Eerik, Lorin, and Eva). Later on, in 2014, as CTO for our company created in 2012, Arnaud has been hired and he conducted data analysis with difficulties because it wasn’t that easy to collect them. He brought some good inputs to our software but he then mostly focused on finding institutional partners and funders for giant projects in Africa that weren’t aligned with our core mission and never happened. Looking back, we notice the absence of any technical improvements by this former CTO during his job with us.

We understand now that instead of improving the tech, this engineer was more passionate about using it as it is, and making the rest of society adjust accordingly. His intentions were good of course, we don’t doubt this. He did succeed in his experiment with NeoLoco. But since a big part of his success was based on the promotion of a Lytefire, for us it’s crucial that NeoLoco’s and Arnaud’s experience is seen as the unique case it is and not a ready model for scale up in France as he portrays it. It is also crucial that he and his friends promote our design to reflect our work and spirit properly.

In the above picture, this early work in 2010 shows a very different tech to what Lytefire evolved to today. We have asked Arnaud multiple times to remove that picture from his public material and to respect how Lytefire wants to be presented and we have not been heard. We are then told that all the promotions he does are good for us. Even when we explain that we never see our work properly represented in his storytelling, it doesn’t matter to him and that’s why it’s not valuable, why it’s damaging for us.

This misrepresentation and cancellation of our work have obviously affected the entire ecosystem in France surrounding to the La Belle Tech group.

Without even getting into Ademe’s official reports attributing the solar oven conception to CPM, labeling it as a low tech without even asking us, barely mentioning our brand, supporting the Normand experiment with various funding mechanisms, etc., we remember well last winter the day we received the Low-tech Journal n°16.

See the beautiful Lytefire solar oven on the cover (below)? A solar coffee experimentation is mentioned in an article, happening somewhere in France at Kerlotec with a Lytefire Deluxe. But guess what? The Lytefire’s name for the solar oven is not mentioned anywhere. Rather, Kerlotec and local ecosystem partners are highlighted as “innovators”. With Lytefire in it all, wouldn’t it be natural to simply mention the tech? But why would they? Kerlotec founders are close to CPM so same ethic there.

So, from now on and without diminishing the skills and “world-changing” intentions of these people, we want our model, our brand and our expertise to be mentioned or referred to properly.

To repeat, Lytefire is neither low-tech nor is it open source.

We would like to be credited and referred to properly or not mentioned at all (and if you chose to not mention us, we ask us not to show us by picture or drawing without credits). We have tried through dialogue many times but we have not been heard which is really weird. None of these activists understands nor seems to care so we say it here now.

The very unique model we have created and defended since 2012 is part of the indispensable diversity needed in renewable technologies, and even if it is based on solidarity it must be referred to properly. Attribution and proper contextualization is a minimum.

Conclusion

If you are about to start a super innovative journey with a new impactful product creating a new market, be careful with whom you allow your first users to be, and how they present your innovation. A story can live long and generate lots of confusion, waste time and create frustration on both sides. And if you are doing something truly innovative, remember that clarity is essential to be able to position your work properly for your users. If you feel undermined, ring the alarm again and again. Better stop what’s happening than hope to salvage it. Unfortunately, we had to learn this a bit of a hard way.

We talked here about a small group of very motivated people driven by an intellectual ambition to use our design and ideas from our model for activism and media gain without ever referring to their original inspiration (Lytefire being one among many obviously, but an outstanding one nonetheless).

And yes, these people sold, under our name, the Deluxe ovens that were not adapted to the French context. We warned them and tried to slow things down but like it is so often the case with activists, they didn’t listen to their cautioning partner at the time. We’ve terminated all forms of cooperation with them and Arnaud sold his shares in 2024. Unfortunately we can see everywhere that they continue to use our design and the experience around it to spread their engineer activist hype in France, everywhere where institutions are in need of creativity and fresh intellectual air. We hope this will stop sooner or later, and that people come back to some common sense.

And mind you, we are not saying that there is no future for solar baking in France, far from it. We are just staying that the NeoLoco and TELED model as portrayed by this group in France is far from being a repliquable success, and that the failure of the Lytefire Deluxe in France should be called that, even if it leads us to the learning’s we have now that create the basis for high-tech improved solar ovens adapted to the French market. More about that soon!

Well, they say that when people start diminishing you it’s the beginning of your success, isn’t it?

Well, maybe. In East Africa, the results of our solar ovens are great and obvious because Lytefire is very adapted to this context.

It can be improved, of course, and we are on it step by step. But the results are here: Lytefire is profitable to its East-African users running small bakeries and it supports the productive use of clean energy.

If you want to know more, don’t hesitate to ask for our case studies in Kenya and Uganda with solar bakeries.

Unfortunately with solar roasting it hasn’t been possible to collect data properly so far, and that’s why it would be amazing to see this being developed in future with French scientists taking interest in this. We are open to collaborate but best is to reach out directly to the artisans.

Lytefire is a tech developed primarily to bring impact to users in Africa and sunny countries, to help entrepreneurs, schools and organizations stop burning charcoal and firewood, and adopt clean energy today. We are the only energy company simultaneously producing industrially, while also supporting NGOs as well as DIYers to go solar. We will continue to bring it to many different professional eco-system’s without any label and without confusion about our core values.

Thank you.

If you are interested in more about our model, Urs has written even more about our innovation and also the open source side of things.
What’s in your hands? Low-Tech, Mid-Tech or High-Tech?
Debunking Open Source in Impact