Inside the Texan warehouse farms of Smallhold, fungi like jumbo royal trumpets, blue oysters, and almost-furry lion’s mane mushrooms pop out from blocks of sawdust. These mushrooms are inside ultraviolet-tinted incubation tanks that are humidity- and temperature-controlled. In a few days, the mushrooms are harvested and packed up for local restaurants and grocery stores.
Retailers like Whole Foods and Texas’s H-E-B have been pushing Brooklyn-based Smallhold to expand production, as sales of specialty mushrooms at grocery stores across America grew about 20% in the past year, according to the Mushroom Council. Smallhold’s mushrooms, now sold in 250 locations across ten states, along with Amazon Fresh and Misfits Market, are particularly in demand because they are organic and provide customers with specialty varieties rarely sold.
Co-founder and CEO Andrew Carter thinks mushroom consumption will only grow as consumers experience better and different fungi at more accessible price points than imported competitors offer.
“The plan is to build these farms all over the place,” says Carter, whose team has grown from 13 employees to more than 70. “It’s a farmers market quality product at an affordable price point. A lot of retailers don’t have access to the mushrooms we grow.”
To keep growing its network of technically managed mushroom farms, Smallhold has raised a $25 million series A, led by Astanor Ventures, a European investing firm started in 2017, alongside Energy Impact Partners and Wheatsheaf Group and other existing investors including AlleyCorp and David Barber’s fund Almanac Insight.
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