About Us
Who we Are and Our Commitment
We are a sustainable agriculture research and production start-up that discovered an environmental process to induce sclerotia formation and fruiting morel mushrooms (Morchella esculenta) on self-formulated agar in petri dishes. We basically solved the first step of propagating the fungi, and can do so repeatedly. We are convinced commercialization of this process will change the Morel supply chain market. This is our Project Morels!
Morels are the # 1 most sought-after gourmet mushroom and mushroom demand in general is on the rise. Due to their life cycle not being well understood, a vast majority of morel supply is procured by foraging methods that can damage ecosystems and is labor-intensive. No market viable indoor farming solution is available.
Unmet Market Demand
Because the morel market supply is so low, statistics on market size are difficult to obtain but the shiitake serves as a comparable example.
- According to a 2020 USDA report, the value of U.S. sales for locally produced shiitake mushrooms during previous year was $24 million. However, in a USDA-SARE national survey of shiitake growers, 89% indicated that the demand consistently exceeded the supply in their region.
- In 2015, researchers from Chatham University interviewed 23 Northeastern buyers who reported only 29% of the demand of locally produced shiitakes were available for purchase.
- Locally produced shiitake demand sales value is approximately $83M. This means that nearly $59M is being left on the table. The supply-demand gap for morel mushrooms is even greater than for shiitake due to current production difficulties and reliance on foraging.
Our indoor method will bring more morels to the market more regularly, solving this problem. Our mission is to enable the local farming and production to supply morels to the market.
Our Mission
Our target customers include direct consumers, culinary artists, food processors, farmers and wholesale distributors.
Our [BR1] revenue model will be to sell a turn-key indoor morel growing system to farmers or food processors, who will then in turn sell or distribute morels to local chefs. Our proprietary agar-based substrate will make for recurring sales, along with maintenance of these systems.
To reduce risk, we will also concurrently produce other specialty mushrooms that have established growing methods as a solid baseline revenue stream utilizing our established chef and direct consumer network and beginning to build our farmer and commercial network.
Our start-up has momentum, having raised cash and in-kind friends and family fundraising round of membership interest, plus $16,000 in state grants through the University of Wisconsin-CTC. These grants included Lean Startup training through the UW-CTC’s Ideadvance program.
We have now been awarded $275,000 by the NSF-SBIR Phase I Seed Fund for research and development and we explore additional funds to support the R&D while having resources for commercialization activities, IP legal and program costs and to establish our first revenue streams.