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Who: Jordan Jent, head mushroom farmer
When: Started in 2018, inside a garage
Employees: 3
What: Texas Fungus grows more than 500 pounds of mushrooms weekly in Arlington and Fort Worth. The mushrooms are sold wholesale to hotels and restaurants. They also sell at farmers markets in Fort Worth, Arlington and Dallas.
Where: Fort Worth and Arlington
Website: texasfungus.com
Fort Worth Report spoke with Jordan Jent about the business. This interview has been edited for content, length, grammar and clarity.
Seth Bodine: How did you start Texas Fungus?
Jordan Jent: I was actually a chef for about 10 years. What so commonly happens in the restaurant industry, chefs get chewed up and spit out. Their intellectual property gets taken and promises get made. And so a company I was with had a very similar situation. So I decided to leave the restaurant industry altogether.
After that, I took a position with Fidelity Investments and went from a very different completely kind of mom and pop sort of burn-and-turn Italian place, to a corporate gig. And I think I was like two weeks into a nine-week training, I was looking for some way out already. I knew it wasn’t for me, and I always wanted to be a business owner. My grandpa was, and I really respected him.
A friend of mine that was in the restaurant industry, he had given me one of those back to the roots, grow your own mushroom kits. And I did all the steps. It didn’t work. I called the company. And I was like, “Hey, how do I do this?” And they’re like, “Well, we don’t have time to explain all of mycology to you. So figure it out.” And I was like, “OK, fine, I’m going to freaking learn it.” And so little by little, I started just kind of going down the rabbit hole.
I was scanning through all these forums. I was looking through YouTube videos. And then I started inoculating hardwood logs that were about 40 inches long. I bought some spawn, and it was just like, fun that I was having in my garage. I had a townhome that was in Dallas, and I had a one-car garage where I was doing all this.
I tried to grow squash and peppers and herbs and tomatoes. Nothing worked. I killed a few cacti. I don’t have a green thumb. And then I got like my first little shiitake. I was like eureka! I can do it.
I converted my garage and my townhome into a little operation. Then my landlord found out about it. He was like, “You can’t operate a business out of here. You have 30 days.” I found the cheapest place that I could operate a commercial operation out of. And Arlington was pretty cheap rent at the time. I finally got the keys to it on Jan. 1, 2019, and I’ve been here ever since.
Bodine: How long did it take you to just learn about all of the intricacies of growing different types of mushrooms?
Jent: It’s every day. I mean, I’m still learning stuff today. It’s kind of an exponential curve.
Bodine: You sell to restaurants, farmers markets, grocery stores. This all built over time?
Jent: I kind of was just like, one-track minded of … whatever private little mom and pop restaurant: “Hey, I got mushrooms, you want them?” Just knocking on the back door.
Now we have a lot more hotel accounts, and we’re hooked up with Marriott.
That’s our sort of model. Chefs bounce around, they play musical chairs, they go from restaurant here to restaurant to restaurant there. And we just focus on trying to have really good relationships with them and let our mushrooms do the talking. A lot of times, they see the quality of what they can get through their food distributor versus what we have. And they make the choice. They say, “OK, we know that working with you is more expensive, but you know, the quality is a match.”
Bodine: What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned in the process of starting your own business?
Jent: You’ve got to be diligent with your books, for sure. And leadership. You have to get work done through other people’s hands, right? Where I’m at now is that I have to kind of take myself off the floor. Because (having) me out there doing the grunt work, it doesn’t grow the company. But at the same point, as a leader, you’ve got to be a man of your word. You’ve got to have high integrity, and you have to be accountable to your team.
So really, I grow three things. I grow mushrooms, I grow my team and then I grow myself. For anybody wanting to have their own business, you have to have some kind of constant education. Because if you knew everything it would take for you to be successful, you would have done it already.
Seth Bodine is a business and economic development reporter for the Fort Worth Report. Contact him at seth.bodine@fortworthreport.org and follow on Twitter at @sbodine120.
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