Mushroom mania grips India: From wellness kits to exotic farms

Mushroom Movement
On a rainy Sunday morning, amid the lush green trees in Bengaluru’s Lal Bagh, close to a dozen people were digging into the wet earth with bare hands.

At the centre was Harikrishnan MT, a scientist by profession and a “mush-head” by passion, who was explaining to the enthusiastic crowd about “agaricus”, a genus of mushrooms, which includes button mushrooms.But the one he had just dug the bottom of a tree had dark brown spores and gills, and happened to be poisonous. This particular variety, called agaricus xanthodermus, stains yellow when you cut the stem open. “It is impossible to tell otherwise if it is poisonous,” he told the absorbed audience.
That morning, the group found more than 25 varieties of mushrooms, including inky caps, pencil shaving mushrooms, deadman’s finger and ganoderma. These urban foraging walks, organised by the Bengaluru-based mushroom wellness startup Nuvedo, is one of the many companies that have come up in the past three years, catering to the growing demand for mushrooms and related products in the country. This is often referred to as ‘shroom boom’ — the rise in growth and foraging of mushrooms, which started a few years ago on the back of increasing awareness about the health benefits of the fungi and rising demand for plant-based food.

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This is resulting in a new range of products such as mushroom coffee, extracts and powders. It is also gaining popularity in mainstream media through series such as the Last of Us. According to Bengaluru-based Jashid Hameed, co-founder, Nuvedo, which sells mushroom wellness products and growing kits, the trend has taken off in India as well. Hameed said that they have sold 50% more products on Amazon this year compared to 2024. “In 2019, if you searched for mushroom extracts, you would hardly find five products. Now, there are more than 100 available. Our sales doubled in the past couple of years,” he shared. All the way in Gurugram, Sumit Sharan, founder, Shroomery, which sells 14 varieties of exotic mushrooms including the Black Fungus, has seen his business grow from Rs 50,000 per month in 2018 to anywhere between Rs 25 lakh and Rs 45 lakh per month. That is a proper boom.

Sumit Sharan, founder, Shroomery

Spore-tacular growth
For many of these founders, the journey into the world of mushrooms started when they saw sheer lack of products available in the market. Take Shroomery’s Sharan for instance. After running a solar energy startup, Sharan wanted to start up again in 2017 when he saw that organic and plant-based food was fast catching up in India. Having lived and worked in other parts of Asia, he found that there were few mushroom varieties available in the country.

“One of the biggest challenges was that there was awareness, but no market. There was hardly anyone in India growing exotic mushrooms. Restaurants did not want to buy unless there was consistent supply,” he said. He spent a few months in the Directorate of Mushroom Research in Solan, Himachal Pradesh, to learn about growing mushrooms, starting with oysters shrooms, and slowly expanded to other varieties.

“There was a lot of trial and error before we could perfect it,” he said. Now, Sharan owns a large farm in the outskirts of Gurugram, where he cultivates mushrooms. Nuvedo’s Hameed and his wife Prithvi Kini started right after the pandemic, when they realised that India’s mushroom products were a “cesspool” flooded with cheap Chinese stuff. So, they decided to build wellness products themselves.

It took them two years, working with Central Food Technological Institute in Mysuru, to get their first product prototype — mushroom extract. But there was no supply chain in the country for building these products from sourcing different mushrooms into the country and other raw materials to grow different types of mushrooms themselves such as sawdust, water and bran.

They currently work with local farmers to source them. This was also what drove them to create a community in India through mushroom walks, where they forage mushrooms, and started selling mushroom growth kits. “We realised that we cannot directly sell mushroom wellness products without creating a stickiness factor. So, we started selling growth kits to educate people about mushrooms,” he said.

Satish Sridhar, who runs a ready-to-eat brand called OG Mushrooms, was fascinated by the world of fungi. He started by growing oyster mushrooms in his backyard after a short course at the institute in Solan. While initially the idea was to sell to restaurants, he realised that this was not sustainable business at scale, and pivoted to ready-to-eat mushroom products.

Fungi Fumble
As much as these players love mushrooms, the business has not been easy. “Growing mushrooms is easier than selling them,” says Hameed. It doesn’t require huge investment, but finding a constant stream of customers is hard, when there are cheaper products available from China and Thailand.

In addition, since growing mushrooms is relatively new, there is a lack of talent in the market. “There is a risk of contamination and you need to identify exactly what is causing it. This requires smart educated people, and they are in dire supply,” Hameed said. Shroomery’s Sharan seconded that notion.

Another problem is commercialisation. The wellness market is growing, but adoption is poor in India. The focus for these startups is market creation. Sharan said, “While restaurants are willing to pay for exotic mushrooms, they want availability round the clock. You cannot put it on the menu today and take it off the next day. So, creating that trust takes time as well.” Nonetheless, the humble shrooms are definitely one to watch out for.

Magic vs Munch
A key concern many have is between edible mushrooms and what are called magic mushrooms. Here’s a ready reckoner with the differences:

Edible Mushrooms

• Include button mushrooms, shiitake, portobello, etc.
• Contain nutrients like vitamins, minerals, fibre and protein.
• No psychoactive or mind-altering compounds.
• Safe to eat and used for culinary purposes.

Magic Mushrooms
Presence of psychoactive compounds like psilocybin and psilocin.

Psilocybin is converted into psilocin in the body, which affects serotonin receptors in the brain.

This causes hallucinations, altered perception of time, mood changes and other mind-altering effects.

These mushrooms themselves aren’t classified as scheduled narcotics.

Even so, psilocybin, a psychedelic, found in these magic mushrooms is a controlled psychotropic substance under the NDPS Act. That makes their cultivation, possession, use, transport, or sale illegal.

Globally research has been going into these substances to study its effect on treating anxiety, depression, addiction and Alzheimer’s.

The US-FDA awarded breakthrough therapy designation for psilocybin in 2018 for treatment-resistant depression (TRD) and in 2019 for major depressive disorder (MDD).

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