BioLite
Brooklyn — a camp stove that charges your phone off its own fire, and a business built so that campers in New York pay for cookstoves in Kenya.
Two designers built a wood stove that used the heat of its own fire to run a fan and charge a phone, and then structured the company so the camping business would fund clean cookstoves in East Africa and India. That is not marketing gloss — by 2021 the founder said Africa would out-earn camping for the first time. BioLite is also now an acquirer: it bought Luci in 2024 and Goal Zero in 2025. Nothing it makes is certified for any kind of work at height, and its flagship headlamp is only IPX4.
- 2006Started as a weekend project by two New York designers
- 157.8B Corp impact score — the qualifying threshold is 80
- 200 hRange 500 runtime on low, at IP67
What we'd reach for
- Range 500500 lumens, 75 grams, IP67 submersible, and 0 to 80% charge in thirty minutes. Eight minutes on the charger buys an hour of light. The one to buy — and more weatherproof than the flagship.
- HeadLamp 800 Pro800 lumens burst, CRI 90 emitter, rear red LEDs, pass-through charging. Also IPX4 and one year of warranty, at a hundred and fifty dollars.
- Dash 450Running-specific, 450 lumens, rear red light for being seen from behind.
- AlpenGlow lanterns500, 250 and Mini. White, color and a shake-to-change gimmick that children find genuinely delightful.
- CampStove 2+The founding product and still the best idea in the catalog. A thermoelectric generator turns fire heat into electricity, which runs the fan and charges the battery. Litre of water boiled in four and a half minutes.
- FirePit+Fifty-one airjets and a 12,800 mAh pack. BioLite claims patents on the double-combustion design, and the smoke reduction is real.
- Luci inflatable solar lanternsAcquired with MPOWERD in 2024. Inflatable, solar, no batteries to buy — twenty dollars and genuinely clever.
- Charge power banks and SolarPanelThe power line, now sitting alongside Goal Zero's Yeti stations.
In 2006, two designers at a New York consultancy started a weekend project.
Jonathan Cedar and Alec Drummond wanted a camp stove that burned wood cleanly. What they built used a thermoelectric generator to convert some of the fire’s own heat into electricity, which ran a fan that improved combustion — and left enough over to charge a phone.
A stove that powers itself and pays you back in electrons is a genuinely elegant piece of engineering, and it went on sale in 2012.
The part that makes the company interesting
The same technology had a second application, and BioLite built the business around both at once.
Roughly two and a half billion people cook over open fires. The HomeStove was the emerging-market version of the same combustion idea, sold in India, Uganda, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and Rwanda. The camping business in North America was designed from the start to fund it — Cedar’s own framing: “our camping business would provide an anchor revenue stream to provide longer-term financing for the emerging market business.”
By 2021 he told Forbes that Africa would generate more revenue than camping for the first time. The cross-subsidy worked, and then stopped being a cross-subsidy.
What is independently verified here is the B Corp certification — BioLite has held it since January 2014 and scores 157.8, against a qualifying threshold of 80 and a median of 50.9 among businesses that complete the assessment. That is a real third-party audit and a genuinely high score.
The bigger numbers — over 14 million people reached in a year, 5 million tons of CO2e avoided — are BioLite’s own figures, published in its impact report. No external auditor, GRI or SASB reference is cited. Carbon credits have been issued against the HomeStove since 2015, which implies some registry methodology, but the registry is not named. We are reporting what the company claims, and telling you which part of it someone else checked.
It is not a startup any more
Most write-ups still describe BioLite as a small Brooklyn company. That stopped being true in the space of six months.
January 2025: the MPOWERD acquisition completed, bringing the Luci inflatable solar lantern line in.
April 2025: BioLite acquired Goal Zero from NRG Energy. Headcount went from 90 to 120, and Goal Zero kept its Salt Lake City base.
BioLite is now a three-brand outdoor energy group — BioLite, Goal Zero, Luci — selling everything from a twenty-dollar inflatable lantern to a fifteen-hundred- dollar power station. Whether the support and warranty operations survive that consolidation intact is not yet knowable.
Buy the cheaper one
The HeadLamp 800 Pro is the flagship at $149.95. It is IPX4 — splash resistant — and carries a one year warranty.
The Range 500 is $69.95. It is IP67, submersible to a meter for half an hour, weighs 75 grams, charges 0 to 80% in thirty minutes, and carries a three year warranty.
The cheap one is more waterproof, lighter and better covered than the expensive one. Treeline Review flagged the 800 Pro’s IPX4 as low for its test group and recommended alternatives for heavy rain or snow. That is unusual advice to be giving about a flagship, and it is the right advice.
One more number worth knowing: an independent bench test measured the 800 Pro at 861 lumens at turn-on, dropping to 197 by thirty seconds, against the 800 headline. Steady high measured 479 against 500 claimed — that part is fair. The burst figure is the one doing the marketing.
The warranty condition nobody reads
BioLite’s warranty requires that the battery has been fully charged by you within seven days of purchase, and at least once every six months thereafter.
Leave a headlamp in a drawer from October to April and you have arguably voided it. Products bought from non-authorised retailers including Amazon and eBay are excluded outright, which matters given how much BioLite stock sits on Amazon.
The 2016 recall is worth stating plainly too: CPSC 17-716, 30 November 2016, around 5,900 BaseLantern and BaseLantern XL units, because “the lithium-ion battery of the lantern can overheat while charging, posing a fire hazard.” One fire with minor property damage, no injuries, Kickstarter-only units, free replacement. Handled properly, and ten years ago.
Nothing here is for work
We should be blunt, because the site this page sits on is mostly about gear that holds people off the ground.
BioLite makes headlamps, lanterns, stoves, fire pits and power. There is no work or trade line, no ATEX, no IECEx, no intrinsic safety, no Class I Division 1 certification anywhere in the range. The product called “Site Lights” means campsite, not construction site.
Taking a BioLite into a classified area would be a genuine safety mistake. The brands that hold the certifications are Ledlenser, Streamlight, Princeton Tec and three specific Nitecore models.
Why we rate them
The stove is a real invention. Burning wood cleanly enough to generate your own electricity is not a marketing angle; it is thermodynamics done well, and they have patents on the combustion side.
The business model is honest and it is documented. Camping funded cookstoves until cookstoves outgrew camping. That is a harder thing to do than to say, and the B Corp score is externally checked.
The Range 500 is the best-value headlamp on this page. IP67, 75 grams, thirty-minute charge, seventy dollars, three-year warranty.
Where BioLite sits across the three disciplines — which is to say, outside all of them: rope rescue, rope access, fall protection — three jobs, one pile of gear.
When the work is done and the fire needs lighting, we reach for BioLite.