Since receiving investment from Carbon13’s SEIS Fund 9, mushroom+ has continued to build momentum with its scientific approach to increase the natural protein content of fresh mushrooms. Rather than creating another processed meat alternative, the company uses synthetic biology to engineer mushrooms before they are grown to create a whole food with significantly higher protein content. In this interview, Carbon13 Head of Marketing Sara Jones speaks with CEO Corinne Pinder and CSO Ressa Lebedinec about the company’s progress, its low cap-ex business model, and why partnering with the world’s leading spawn companies could enable rapid global scale.
Sara: I’m joined by Corinne and Ressa of Mushroom Plus, and we’re going to deep dive into the world of protein and synthetic biology. Can you explain for everybody what is mushroom+ all about in a nutshell.
Ressa: So very quickly, we are engineering mushrooms to be 10 times higher in protein and comparable to meat. And we are doing that through using synthetic biology.
The science
Sara: Let’s nerd out about the science then, because I want to understand a bit more about this because we’ve seen alternative mushroom for protein before. That industry has struggled with the investment case for that. What is it about the technical part of what you’re doing which makes this so much more exciting than what has come before?
Corinne: So, we are working with whole fresh edible mushrooms. It’s not a processed product. It’s not a mycelium bacon or an additive to another food item. And all we’re doing technologically is using our experience in molecular mycology to enhance that natural protein level in mushrooms. The final product is this is this whole food that everyone recognises, whether they are vegan, vegetarian, flexitarian, or a meat eater.
SUPPLY CHAIN & GO-TO-MARKET
Sara: Where does this slot into the supply chain? Who are you actually going to be selling to?
Ressa: We will be B2B sales to the head of the existing mushroom supply chain, which is called the Spawn Company stage. The mushroom industry is a multi-level kind of stakeholder chain, you have the people that provide mother cultures at the top, which will be us.
Then they sell mushroom strains to spawn companies who basically generate the seedling of the mushroom. Spawn companies sell the spawn to growers who then plant and grow the mushroom on a large scale.
We don’t need to build any growth facilities, spawning facilities, factories, shops, anything like that already exists for us to use. We’re simply upgrading their starting stock to have a better nutritional profile; it keeps us low operational capital costs and low start-up costs because all we need is a lab to produce what we need to produce to then sell to the existing chain.
TRACTION
Sara: Are you able to share some of the traction with the spawn companies and the appetite for this?
Ressa: So, there’s a domination of three. They’d probably cover 90% of the planet in terms of spawning. And we have traction with all three. We recently got flown out by the third biggest in the world to tour their facilities and pitch to them. We are now in the process of negotiating the type of partnership that we would like to have which might not just include them being a customer. We get to use their facilities and, they might get some sort of exclusivity.
THE 10 YEAR VISION
Sara: Say all this traction continues. How big does this get? What’s happening in 10 years’ time if the vision is realised? What does what’s Mushroom Plus’s effect going to have been?
Ressa: Our vision is global. We would like to be able to be in every store available at a price point that is accessible to most people. And extending past the food goal for mushroom+, mycelium products are taking off in other sectors, such as the built environment and materials. Those sectors are working with natural strains of mushroom, but they lack things such as tensile strength or fireproofing. If we can edit a mushroom to be safe and healthy to eat, then we can edit a mushroom to improve on these other fronts that these other the sectors are requiring.
THE ONE LINE PITCH FOR INVESTORS
Sara: When you are talking to investors what is the one takeaway you want them to have about mushroom plus
Corinne: So, in a single sentence, we want investors to know that our venture is simple, scalable, and without huge operational costs.
Even though it seems straightforward on paper, the positive impacts are wide ranging. We want people to know that investing in this, while a straightforward idea, has big downstream positive effects from environmental savings of emission, land use and building a more resilient food system because protein is production can be brought indoors away from extreme weathers.
Sara: All right, then, Corinne and Ressa, thank you so much. Those are all my questions.