My Shop Is Back!
After a 2 year hiatus and the shut down of my online store/website back in 2021, I am finally back at it with my offerings and products. The truth is in 2021, I became a single father of my two young boys and have been a full time parent since then. The past couple of years has not allowed me to pursue my work and dream I have chosen for myself back in 2020.
I had originally set out to grow gourmet mushrooms and exotic fungal produce for my local community and restaurants. Then came the pandemic and shortly followed were shutdowns.
The very first day of my very first deliveries to a handful of chefs and restaurants was a Thursday in march 2020. Ill never forget.. This was the day everything was officially mandated to shut down.
The way mushroom farming works is, you are always working about a month or more in the future with produce production. When the shutdowns happened and my clients i landed were no longer able to buy hundreds of pounds of produce i had queued for the next few months. This was devastating in the moment. I had to adapt to the situation though, and quickly turned to social media as an outlet for produce sales. This was about the time when the grocery stores were not able to keep up with the emergency and people buying food. The shelves were empty everywhere! I offered “no contact” local door step deliveries and pick-ups at my farm. It was a lot more work to coordinate everything, but at least i was able to supply people with organic, healthy, single sourced mushrooms to my local community during the food shortages.
Ultimately, this built my brand, “Unkle Fungus Mushrooms LLC” and gave me gradual organic traction through “word of mouth” and social media.
After dialing back gourmet produce production to meet the demand, and partnering up with the few local businesses that fought through the pandemic just as i was, things began to loosen up with shutdowns. Things were starting to look up so I increased production while landing a bunch of new clients and chefs. But once again, everything shut down!
This was a huge financial blow and i once again, had to adapt to the situation. I started doing Roots Market every Tuesday in Mannheim PA. It was a great outlet for selling my produce for they remained open through the second wave of shutdowns. I did Roots Market for almost two years which helped further build my brand and getting to meet all of my customers face to face.
After a string of personal life events unfortunately occurred, the time rapidly approached when i had to make a serious decision. I had to drop what i was doing to take care of my children. Nothing else was as important to me than my children. Between the tasks of growing mushrooms, seasonal foraging, production of unique small batch/ single sourced value added products, markets, deliveries, and running the business through social media, my time was completely consumed. The forced transition between mushroom farmer to full time father without the ability to work was an overnight shift that left me and every one of my supporters in the dark. It took everything i had to adapt to the new life style which meant abandoning what i had built to focus on my children.
Fast forward 2 years, my children and family has grown. I am finally in a good place to start working on Unkle Fungus Mushrooms LLC again! With a completely new outlook and business design, i plan to focus on just a few things and disregard gourmet mushroom production for produce sales all together. This new outlook allows me to provide for my family while allowing me to also be present in ways my children and family need me to be.
I want to thank new and continued supporters for helping me support my family. There is a lot of interesting things on the horizon for Unkle Fungus Mushrooms. Stay tuned for some interesting offerings I’ve been cooking up along with private events and much more scheduled for the 2024 season.
MushLOVE to all of you,
-Drew Zimmerman
UFM