Is Mycorrhizal Systems Still in Business? (2026 Update)
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Look for Mycorrhizal Systems on AmazonFull story →Paul Thomas pitched a plan to plant truffle-bearing woodland across the UK, wanting £75,000 for 25 percent of the business, and Simon Woodroffe agreed to back it.
More than twenty years on, the company is thriving.
A Patience Test In The Show's First Series
Truffle trees take years to produce a usable crop, an awkward fit for a show built on fast, confident pitches, and the panel reportedly met this one with real doubt about both the underlying science and the timeline involved.
Woodroffe backed the £75,000 ask for the 25 percent stake regardless, a genuine vote of confidence in an idea nobody had yet proven could work on British soil.
Two Decades Building A New Industry
Thomas eventually built and ran what is described as the world's biggest truffle-growing operation, spanning more than 30 sites across the UK alone, and by 2015 his team had grown and harvested Britain's first home-cultivated truffle, a genuine agricultural first.
Few pitches from the show's earliest run have aged into anything close to a category-defining business, and this is one of the clearer cases where the panel's initial scepticism said more about the format's limits than about the idea itself.
Where Things Stand
The company now runs plantation sites and advisory work across dozens of UK locations and beyond, built from one of the more doubted pitches the show has ever filmed.
The truffle venture from the show's opening series turned into something few other pitches from any era of the archive can match.