Building a Business

Kevin Doyle has always been interested in botany and the natural world. He worked on a potato farm as a kid, studied biology and botany at St. John’s University, and studied the cultivation of peat bogs for fuel in Ireland. Then one day, while he was working on another bio-fuel project at the University of Minnesota, Kevin came across a book titled “Food, Fuel and Fiber from Organic Waste”, and thumbed through the chapter on growing mushrooms on waste. Intrigued, he got his own copy of the book, ordered all the papers in the bibliography to start researching, and Forest Mushrooms Inc. was born.

Well, at the least the idea was born. The road from there to becoming an established mushroom producer and distributor has been long and uncertain, with many leaps of faith required.

In 1982, a friend of Kevin’s was getting his Masters in Business Management, and needed to create a sample business plan for an assignment. So the two of them sat down to make spread sheets for expenses, get basic ideas of how long to the first harvest, etc. A while later they ran into a friend at a high school reunion who offered his basement for rent to give it a go. Kevin worked all week, winter and spring, with the other two men contributing every weekend, Friday through Sunday, for months and months. The set up consisted of a lot of heavy physical labor. “We liked to think of it as a health club,” laughs Kevin. “You pay a fee and come work out all weekend.”

By April 1986 they were producing 30 to 100 pounds per week, and started selling to white table-cloth restaurants in the Twin Cities. Kevin feels that what sold their product (since they couldn’t under price) was that 100 percent of their shipment was usable by the time it got to the chefs, because they were producing locally and cutting the shipment by thousands of miles in most cases.

Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained

Feeling ready to go full scale that March, they heard about an old hog farm for sale up in St. Joe, and Kevin and his wife Wendy purchased it. “Nothing ventured nothing gained, right?” says Kevin. “It was the first of many leaps of faith we had to take.”

So they started form scratch, turning the old farrowing barn in to areas for composting, spawning, fruiting, the boiler, the cooler, the office, etc…and installed environmental control systems to regulate the temperature and humidity. The two partners, who still had jobs in the city, continued to come up weekends to work and brought sleeping bags for the hayloft. By July of 86 they had their first crop of oyster mushrooms, and by January of that year, Forest Mushrooms Inc. was producing 800 lbs. a week.

Then in 1987, production suddenly went from 800 to 80 lbs per week. Kevin found out later it was because they had starting using rye-straw to compost which is too hard to break down, and they had not known that it made a difference. “It was a painful lesson,” Kevin says. “but where else do you learn these things?” They had recently taken out a loan, and the other two men, feeling like they were into it as far as they could go, bailed out. But Wendy and Kevin weren’t quite ready to throw in the towel. “We went out to the barn, sat on a couple of buckets, and bought all the equipment from the two of them for $2,300 each,” says Kevin.

With help from the Central MN Initiative Fund, Kevin and Wendy attended a mushroom conference in Germany and met a fellow from Holland who had developed machinery that made compost in which to grow oyster mushrooms (they had been steam sterilizing straw by hand). So they came back with a business plan, deciding they needed $150, 000 to pay off the land, and purchase this machine and other supplies. Before taking out a loan, Kevin talked to Wendy one more time, who said “I don’t want to hear you whine the rest of your life because you wish you’d done it.” Se they did.

By the following year, they had grown to five employees, and they also started buying from other producers to increase the selection they could offer to customers. They now distribute to supermarkets, retailers, restaurants, and wholesalers, as well as selling at the farmer’s market at St. Joe’s on Friday afternoons (which has been a big success). Kevin enjoys the direct marketing to restaurants because “ It makes it more fun….to meet someone who is actually going to be cutting up your mushrooms later in the day.”

Although it has been a long road for Kevin and Forest Mushrooms, it has been a labor of love with much reward. With a spirit like Kevin’s, no doubt there will be many more rewards on down the road ahead.