Field & Forest Products 25 Years of Certified Success
Field & Forest Products
25 Years of Certified Success
By Joe Pedretti, Client Services Director
Editor’s Note: This is Part 2, Covering the last ten years of expansion. Read Part 1 for the early history: Spawning a Successful Organic Mushroom Business or see Vol. 13 Issue 2 (May/June 2015) of The Organic Cultivator. Field & Forest Products’ primary business is producing mushroom spawn used by other growers to produce mushroom crops. They also do some limited fresh mushroom production.
When Part 1 of the story of Field & Forest Products was written in 2015, owners Joe Krawczyk and Mary Ellen Kozak were working on plans to build a new facility for their mushroom spawn production business. The original facility, built on Mary Ellen’s home farm, was past its limit both based upon size, and upon local utility limitations. Joe and Mary Ellen faced a difficult decision - sell the business, or take on the debt and work to build a new facility.
“Our epic began in 1983 with the introduction of shiitake mushroom production on natural logs in the United States. The old facility was sized to meet the demand for spawn that we were seeing at that time. By 2015 we were out of space and we started working with UW-Extension on a business plan. At first we thought ‘we’ve been at this for thirty years, let’s just sell the equipment and call it a day. The small business consultant we worked with told us that selling the assets would be insane, because when he looked at the financials, especially the spawn end of the business, he had never seen a business run so efficiently and profitably,” reflected Joe.
“At that point, we knew we had to make a big change here, because if we kept the business going, we could not survive in the old facility. We then pivoted and started planning to build a new facility. We were fortunate that we had good connections in the Japanese mushroom industry that we had established. We were able to travel to Japan and meet with Fuji Spawn, the largest producer of spawn for the natural log industry. We toured their facility and then the dance began with the Japanese talking about how we could ‘scratch each other’s backs.’ They were very helpful in terms of designing our new building and with equipment acquisition. I don’t think we could have done it as efficiently without their input.”
“In 2017 we pulled the trigger and went into a massive amount of debt to build this facility. The construction went really well, and everything was peachy keen with the building, but we had taken a year off from marketing while we focused on the building expansion, and sales tanked. Our worst year ever,” lamented Joe.
“But despite that initial setback, we were really well positioned to produce and supply both the current needs of the industry, but the future needs as well. We were able to turn it around with that great ‘Midwestern work ethic.’ We simply put our nose to the grindstone and went for it. We put some effort into a new catalog, some new email marketing, and some new staff that were vested in the business. They were answering the phones and providing excellent customer service and things eventually turned around. And not too long after, the pandemic happened, and that really turned the business around. People were stuck at home and they were looking for something to do, and growing mushrooms fit the bill. That contributed to what we call the ‘shroom boom.’ Sales across the industry went through the roof,” emphasized Joe.
“In this industry, there are so many paths you can follow. You can produce spawn, fresh mushrooms, tinctures, powders, extracts. You can cultivate so many mushrooms using so many techniques. You have to decide ‘what’s your niche?’ It’s really easy to get distracted. We just had to really focus on the fact that we are a spawn company. That’s what we do. We don’t sell lab equipment, We don’t sell books. We don’t sell medicinals. That’s not our business. Our business is to produce mushroom spawn. Getting that focus back really helped us move along and we were in the right place when the demand increased. We stayed true to what we do and how we do it.”
“The new facility was designed with spawn production in mind. The key is good workflow and the ability to separate ‘clean areas from dirty.’ We have office space of about 2000 square feet for a good working environment, lot’s of natural light, a break room and quiet space. And we have 8000 square feet of production space. That production space is set up so that on one end, all the dirty product, the raw materials come in. On the other end is our shipping department. In between is the clean facilities. Our clean areas are designed and maintained to prevent contamination issues. Depending on the clean room, all air within the room is changed hourly using ULPA (ultra low particulate air) filtration and having a lot of strict protocols on which staff members can enter these clean areas.”
“On most days raw materials, sawdust mostly, are hydrated and put in our blender to be mixed. After blending, it’s bagged. We bought this great bagging machine that can fill ten bags a minute. The bags are loaded onto trolleys and get pushed into a large sterilizer, which we bought second hand from Japan that can sterilize a thousand bags at a time. Once the bags are sterilized, the sterilizer gets unloaded into the first room of our ‘clean’ section, the cooling room. The bags cool overnight in that clean environment and then taken into our inoculation room the next day,” explained Joe.
“We used to inoculate (editor’s note: Inoculation is the process of inserting the mushroom spawn into a substrate that is suitable for growing fungus) with machines, but the staff that run our inoculation room are so efficient by hand that we have stopped using the machines. Once inoculated, they are rolled down a clean corridor to the incubation room. Where they sit for however long before being sold and moving on to the shipping department or into cold storage. We also have a clean lab and a clean mother spawn room where all of our master cultures are stored. That area is off limits to everyone except our mycologist, to ensure that it is kept clean.”
“Everything that comes out of incubation is ready to use, but what is not immediately sold goes into our cold storage room, basically a very large walk-in cooler where we can store things in stasis until they are sold. Orders are run every morning, and our shipping team picks, packs and gets everything out the door. During our slow time we ship 70-80 orders a day. During our busy time, Springtime, we’ll ship about 300 orders a day. We are busiest from January through May. We still do a little bit of fresh mushroom production during the summer to make sure our quality is up to snuff. We sell at the Green Bay Farmers Market.”
“We currently have 14 full time and one part time employees. Our daughter and son have also joined the business- Phoebe in 2019, and Nik in 2023. Along with Mary Ellen, they have the sales and marketing responsibilities. We also have one full time sales person and another staff member that handles the catalog and email marketing. Our mycologist even takes a phone shift, just to keep up with what’s going on with the growers to hear what’s new and exciting. We have two production people, and three to four people in the shipping department. Field & Forest Products now sells certified organic mushroom spawn for shiitake, oyster, Agaricus, lion’s mane, reishi, wine caps, and many others. Business has tripled over the last decade,” noted Joe.
“If I had a redo I would add on about 2500 extra square feet of incubation space, especially for shiitake blocks which take three months to incubate. We do that offsite now because we just don’t have the space. As far as the future goes, we’re always concerned about cheap imports from China, but I think we have a really good established base of growers in the US so we’re not too worried about that possibility. Our next enterprise is going to take five years to bring to fruition, which is the cultivation of the burgundy truffle, and a native truffle known as the Michigan truffle that we will rebrand as the Great Lakes truffle. Truffles need a lot of land, so we tilled about an acre of land to start a truffle orchard. That project is coming along slowly but surely.”
“For the future we really need to drive home the sustainability of mushroom production on natural logs. That is our niche. We need to do more to reach the consumer and emphasize the sustainability of raising mushrooms on forest products. For the most part, every mushroom you buy at the grocery store is grown on sawdust, and that involves a huge amount of plastic. It’s phenomenal the amount of waste that’s produced. There’s got to be a way to make this more sustainable and log-grown culture is the way to go,” stated Joe.
“We are also getting ready to visit a Wisconsin company who are working on a grant from the Army to produce an insulation panel out of hemp hurd held together with fungal mycelium. We’re excited about the possibility of energy efficiency and reducing plastic use. Our future is going to be focused on sustainability and that will keep Mary and I involved for quite a while. We love what we do.”
To learn more about Field & Forest Products, visit their website at: https://www.fieldforest.net/