The Exchanges

Q So did anybody wind up actually sampling mushrooms?

A Uh, it was actually funny. That, that's, speaking of, you know, never really being chefs or foodies or, you know, gourmet cooks or anything, neither one of us was trying those mushrooms, but we were like, what's the best restaurant in town? And we both had heard about this restaurant called Chez Panisse, uh, by Chef Alice Waters, who is just an absolute legend and one of the, you know, founders of this entire natural organic food movement with a restaurant right there in Berkeley. We didn't know any of that. We just knew it was this famous restaurant in Berkeley, and we ended up, um, literally walking over this paint bucket, this one paint bucket of mushrooms, walked it over, and she happened to be in the front of a restaurant. She was talking to somebody, and we just, uh, walked right up to her and said, hey, Alice, like, I'm Nick Hill. This is Alex. We're trying to grow these mushrooms on coffee grounds. We just grew some. Uh, would you want to try some? And, uh, you know, she got super into it, and she's like, that's really cool, and, um, come to the back with me, and she actually walked us to the back of her restaurant, uh, to the kitchen, where her head chef, this guy named Cal, was, and she's like, Cal, you wanna, do you wanna try some of these mushrooms these boys are growing, and, um, he ends up plucking half, half of the mushrooms out of his bucket, And I remember he c…

AI assessment note: “she tries them, he tries them, we try them”

Q And, and at this point, I mean, you guys are seeing that people like to grow things at home, and around the time you wind up getting some inspiration Inspiration for your, your next idea from after a visit you, you take to Wisconsin, um, and a tour of an aquaponics farm there. What, what's the story?

A Yep. It was called growing powers is huge city block size aquaponics system. Um, kind of Will Allen, he won the MacArthur award for this. He was raising tilapia. So aquaponics is raising fish and plants. All the fish waste was fertilizing the vegetables and the plants in turn were cleaning the water and And taking out the, you know, the nitrogen from it. So it was a really cool closed loop system where the fish feed the plants, plants clean the water. And, you know, this is where our own curiosity about just growing food and growing things different ways was like had been peaked now. And, you know, we were obviously doing with a mushroom farm, but we were like, what else, how else people are growing? And we started like asking ourselves, like, is there a way to do what we did for mushroom farming for aquaponics and like shrink down a big mushroom farm down to this tabletop classroom experience?

AI assessment note: “is there a way to do what we did for mushroom farming for aquaponics”

Q Alright, so the professor says, hey, um, you can grow mushrooms on coffee grounds. Why was that interesting to you? Why did you think that was interesting?

A You know, I think, I've asked myself that question a lot over these years, and I think for me, it was, you know, this kind of focus on sustainability and recycling. It was all the summers when my grandparents, who had this beautiful garden in a small town, would grow all their own food, and hearing something about growing food, my, you know, my parents teaching me about kind of just, my dad always in my ear about recycling, and I think all of those experiences at the course of, you know, at that .2 decades, Made that relevant to me at that moment and said, that's really cool, growing food off of waste. And I think going through my mind was like, is there something here? This is a really cool idea.

AI assessment note: “for me, it was, you know, this kind of focus on sustainability and recycling.”

Q the two of you, and your, your small staff, that you couldn't really figure out where this was going to go, or at this point did you, did the two of you start to have conversations saying, hey, you know, maybe we should kind of assess what we want to do here, where we should focus, or, or was it just like, let's just keep doing, doing it this way?

A We had gotten our mushroom kits from farmer's markets, then we got them into Whole Foods, um, and Randy was, uh, You know, a mentor of ours, and actually, I remember the first time we took this big, uh, like, basketball-sized bag that we were growing these mushrooms in, and we had slapped a sticker on it from FedEx. We thought it looked beautiful. We were in a meeting with Randy talking about fresh mushrooms, and at the end of the meeting, we pull out this mushroom kit, you know, with all the confidence in the world, as if it was the next iPhone, right? And we put it on the table. We're like, one more thing, Randy. What about this mushroom kit? And he looks at this Bag. And I know he literally falls out of his chair. He's like, that's the most disgusting thing I've ever seen. No one's going to buy that in my store. And he just, you know, laughed at this thing. And, but he was also, you know, by that point, a friend, a mentor, and it wasn't a no. He was like, just go back and figure this thing out because it's cool, but this thing looks hideous. No one's going to put this on their windowsill. And, uh, it was actually the push that we needed at that time to really kind of make us focus in on the design and the user experience. We came back with what is, you know, a version of what is What it is today, and start selling that on Whole Foods, and we were for a while selling both of …

AI assessment note: “it was actually the push that we needed at that time to really kind of make us focus”

Q Um, and, um, by the way, why are coffee grounds good for growing mushrooms?

A So super rich in cellulose. The cellulose structure of coffee grounds mimics that of, you know, um, a tree on which oyster mushrooms would traditionally grow. And what's crazy, so the whole reason we started this thing off is that traditionally, mushrooms are grown on virgin trees being cut down for their logs, mainly overseas, um, as a substrate to grow mushrooms. And when we first heard this fact, we're like, wait, we're, we're importing mushrooms. That are grown on virgin trees being cut down just for this substrate when you have this whole massive waste stream, millions and millions of pounds in our local communities, and we could grow this food locally. That's what inspired this whole thing. Like, that was crazy that people were cutting down trees to grow mushrooms when there was so much agricultural waste and kind of this food waste around to do it. So one of the ideas there was like, should we just collect all these coffee grounds and try to sell it to a mushroom farm? And, uh, finally we're like, we should probably just try growing this ourselves, see if it even works.

AI assessment note: “The cellulose structure of coffee grounds mimics that of, you know, um, a tree”

Q I have to imagine the costs are going to be higher than half a million dollars. You probably make them in China, get them shipped over. I mean, there's a lot of math and a lot of like projections that you have to get right to make this work. Even if you have purchase orders, like it can all go south. So how were you able to successfully manage that?

A Two things, Guy. One, just on where the manufacturer, we actually manufacture them all in the US for a brand, too. We really try to focus on US manufacturing, and a bulk of that, probably half of that went to the tooling, which is really expensive, and the design cost and engineering cost. So yeah, most of that was there, and then for initial inventory costs. Um, but I, I think the risk was almost less about the initial forecast, Uh, because, you know, we had pre-orders, thousands of them, from our consumers through Kickstarter. We had POs from retailers, so we knew what the demand was, but our, one of our biggest mistakes we made, and almost put us out of business, was we started feeling a lot of pressure to deliver this on a timeline that we, that we, uh, was too aggressive, and we didn't know that it was too aggressive when we put it out there on Kickstarter.

AI assessment note: “we had pre-orders, thousands of them, from our consumers through Kickstarter.”