A new startup business in Fredericton is starting to grow on weekend market-goers and local restaurant owners.
Longtime friends Greg Collette and Mike Kendrick are local entrepreneurs who recently started a company called ‘Backyard Mushrooms’.
The duo grow gourmet mushrooms at one of their homes in Pepper Creek, a subdivision on the outskirts of Fredericton.
Collette spent 23 years serving in the military as infantry and then went back to New Brunswick Community College (NBCC) to get an accounting degree, and at the end of the program said he was required to develop a business plan for anything he wanted.
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“I’m not one to do something for nothing. So, I was struggling to find an idea and one night over a beer and a bonfire Mike and I were discussing doing a collaboration with our small little hobby farm and he had mushrooms to offer into that pot,” Collette said.
He said Kendrick showed him the mushrooms and they talked about how to grow them, what the cost was on the market, and said it all sounded “too good to be true,” leading him to develop the business plan.
“When I did it, I went back to Mike and said, ‘Man this looks pretty good, I think we should do it. Let’s just get it up and running and see what we can do.'”
The pair started with 100 logs three years ago to grow shiitake and oyster mushrooms on from trees they harvested in Collette’s backyard.
The following year they planned on having 300 logs, but realized there was a big demand and decided to expand to 2,000 shiitake logs and 600 oyster mushroom logs. This past year they’ve expanded by hundreds more.
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Kendrick said the mushrooms all sold out within 2.5 hours, and said they will triple the amount they bring this weekend and see how it goes, but said he’s optimistic they will sell out again this week.
Kendrick told Global News he was working part-time until the fall and is now focusing on the mushroom business to see if they can turn it into a viable business.
“We do believe that we can make it into a viable business. It’s just a matter of time,” Kendrick said.
“Never in a million years [did I think] I’d be a mushroom farmer after I retired,”Collette said.
He said mushrooms at grocery stores are mainly from Ontario and selling for $20.45 per pound.
“I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s success yet,” Kendrick said. “This is basically proof of concept, we’re doing this to test the market.”
He said they already had the infrastructure in place on their properties and didn’t have to buy any land, but said the business is quite labour intensive.
“The risk is the sweat equity that we’ve put into it,” Kendrick said. “Most of our work is labour intensive, so it’s basically two feet and a heartbeat for us.”
Collette said they’ll grow the farm as the market grows and said they won’t let themselves go into large debt for the business.
The pair said they do have some funding and support through the Pond-Deshpande Centre for marketing materials as well as coaching.
“The biggest challenge is as an entrepreneur you have this end goal dream, but in this businesses we have to grow so slow,” Collette said. “Through lessons learned by many other companies around New Brunswick, they grew too fast, too big, they created this large overhead and then they went under in a couple years.”
Kendrick said they may later expand to selling at other markets such as in St. Andrews, Saint John or Moncton, but said that could be a year or two away.
“So success is not here yet but I think we’re on the right track,” Kendrick said.
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