Shroom to Grow
Aron Ponticelli (GSM'99) moves from finance to fungi
By Jenna Ivers
Aron Ponticelli on his truffle farm
Aron Ponticelli (GSM’99) understands what it means to grow a business. Literally. Along with his father, Jack Ponticelli, he founded Piedmont Valley Truffles, located in the foothills of North Carolina’s Piedmont region. It is one of the leading growers and distributers of black truffles in the Western Hemisphere.
Ponticelli comes to the esoteric world of truffles from the distinctly harder-edged world of business. He remains a director of a financial software company based in Greenwich, Connecticut, that provides enterprise solutions for investment management firms. Before that, he was a founding partner of a web-based transportation exchange and e-procurement service funded by Goldman Sachs, and he worked on Wall Street with Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. as a financial analyst.
How do you get from finance to fungi? It started with Jack, Aron’s creative and entrepreneurial father, who, among other activities, has run a hot-air balloon business, is a woodworker and gunsmith, and now helps train the truffle-sniffing dogs employed on Piedmont’s farms.
It was Jack who urged Aron to think truffles, and the two began to work up a business plan. Aron networked with bankers, investors, entrepreneurs, chefs, and others in his hometown of New York City, and by 2002, he’d raised the initial capital to fund operations on 30 acres. Piedmont has since grown to 110 acres, with more growth planned. Aron quickly perceived that truffle production, a nascent industry in the United States, could become a much larger phenomenon. Looking to the model set by Robert Mondavi, who is credited with building the modern California wine industry in the 1960s and 1970s, he works collaboratively with other growers and distributors, believing the collaboration will benefit everyone.
“It’s important to be open-minded and flexible when you’re starting a business, to be willing to take some risks and be patient,” Aron says. “You never know where things might lead.” Right now, he’s predicting that over the next ten to fifteen years, as the industry matures, Piedmont will grow into a $20 million dollar business with a 75% profit margin. That’s a lot of mushrooms.