We recently connected with EvaSara and have shared our conversation below.

EvaSara , appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

My business partner Enrique and I began contemplating business ideas together in late 2019 after years of our own, independent brain storming. We both knew we wanted to grow food as a business, since we coincidently both come from generations of corn farmers from Mexico. He dreamed of an indoor basil farm while I was more into growing herbs like chamomile and catnip. During our research, we quickly realized that traditional farming in Las Vegas was pretty difficult due to zoning laws, lack of affordable land, and more obviously the extreme weather. We found hydroponically grown food could be very successful here but then realized a large indoor basil and lettuce farm already existed and was doing pretty well. After finding all the farms in the area, we learned locally grown foods were far and few in between and one food in particular was completely missing! It was mushrooms, and not just any mushrooms, but the gourmet varieties like Oysters and Lion’s Mane that were becoming extremely popular around the country. After watching a few videos on indoor mushroom farming, we enthusiastically decided to make our idea come to life. I personally felt confident that with Enrique’s engineering background and my risk-taking, relentless nature, we could actually build something new and refreshing for our city and most importantly make it sustainable and profitable. What was mostly exciting about our business idea was that gourmet mushroom farming in general is fairly novel which meant we had to learn everything through trial and error as there was very little information available on the internet. This pushed us to be innovative and creative. We spent the first couple years of our business venture learning and perfecting the environmental conditions needed to grow the mushrooms in a small 1000 foot warehouse off the strip. We realized mushrooms were a hot commodity and quickly needed to grow more. We then found a bigger warehouse where we built our own custom grow rooms on our own. Now we have 6000+ square feet, grow 1600 lbs a week and plan on buying some land to grow more mushrooms and even other types of food for our city. Although the journey has been difficult, scary and sometimes overwhelming, the way Las Vegas embraced us from the start has been extremely rewarding, especially since we started this business with the ultimate goal to offer Vegas more fresh, locally grown food.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

My name is EvaSara Luna. My business partner, Enrique Gonzalez and I are both born and raised in Las Vegas and started our business with the goal to offer Las Vegas more fresh, locally grown foods. We noticed the city was missing fresh produce, more specifically gourmet mushrooms. We rarely saw any of the varieties we grow on restaurant menu’s and they definitely weren’t available in grocery stores at the time. So we set out to build our own indoor farm and took it upon ourselves to perfect the craft and educate the city on the wonderful world of mushrooms. Our ability to feed our native city fresh, healthy food drives and fulfills us to no end. We love to introduce people to a new food they’ve never seen or tasted before. Our business is small yet mighty and we are always trying our best to be as helpful and informative as possible. It is truly our passion!

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

When we started our farm, there were 5-6 other small mushroom farms starting at the same time! Although it was fairly easy to sell our mushrooms, we quickly realized that growing them was more difficult than we expected. It was highly labor intensive and required more knowledge and time than we initially thought. Our personal lives became non-existent and we worked non-stop to attend farmers markets, making restaurant deliveries, growing the mushrooms, and also building out the new and improved farm in a bigger warehouse next door. On top of that, we did not pay ourselves for 4 years. We bootstrapped and used our savings to fund the farm and that was very scary and difficult. Sadly all the other mushroom farms closed down and to say we were exhausted is an understatement but we believed in ourselves and our mission, never let ourselves quit, and now we are finally over the hump. We now have the help of our amazing employees and are building out a new warehouse to grow more mushrooms!

Any fun sales or marketing stories?

When we first started, we knew one of our main challenges would be introducing the mushrooms to the city and making people excited to try them. Education became one of our main focuses and we knew it would take quite some effort to get into the restaurants on the Las Vegas strip. We decided to start cold-visiting as many restaurants as possible to introduce ourselves and our products to as many chefs that would give us their time. To our surprise, most chefs were very welcoming and excited to see new product and would often tell us they would be happy to incorporate our mushrooms to their menu. We learned that it often took many many months for chefs to actually order and even more surprising, there would be huge roadblocks in becoming approved vendors at these high end hotel restaurants. It took us many visits and 3 years to become a vendor at the MGM properties! But luckily for us, word of mouth between chefs became our best friend. It didn’t take long before we started getting inquiries from chefs instead of us going to restaurants ourselves. We still do the occasional cold-visit to say hi to our chefs and tell them we appreciate them.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.desertmoonfarms.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/desert_moon_mushrooms
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DesertMoonFarms
• Youtube: @desertmoonmushrooms3423

Image Credits

EvaSara Luna and Enrique Gonzalez