| Direct and Wholesale Fresh Gourmet Mushrooms |
Owners: Lance Schiola | Ben Young
Colorado Mushrooms, located in Brighton, CO, is an indoor farm producing the freshest, locally grown gourmet mushrooms for chefs, restaurants, grocers, and CSAs. Colorado Mushrooms LLC, located in Brighton, CO, is an indoor farm producing the freshest, locally grown gourmet mushrooms for chefs, restaurants, grocers
, CSAs and farmers markets in the Denver/Boulder-area. Sustainability and innovation in our local food system drives Colorado Mushrooms to create the highest quality products possible. We grow our mushrooms indoors in a state-of-the-art facility with specially designed, climate controlled growing rooms; enabling us to provide our mushrooms with the perfect environment to grow throughout the year, regardless of what the unpredictable Colorado weather decides. Grown using all-natural ingredients, without the use of pesticides or man-made fertilizers, Colorado Mushrooms products are one of the healthiest, environmentally conscious choices a consumer can make in produce. Colorado Mushrooms will customize our solutions to your exact needs and give you access to sustainable produce that’s as delicious as it is beautiful. OUR STORY
Co-Founders, Ben Young and Lance Schiola, first met in high school in 2001 when Ben was transplanted from Alabama to Colorado. After both graduated from Colorado State University, they ventured off into the corporate world of financial services and IT consulting. A few years back, Ben ignited a passion for growing fresh, gourmet mushrooms and was drawn into the world of mycology and sustainable farming. Of course, Lance came along for the ride, and this was where the idea for Colorado Mushrooms LLC began. In 2018, Ben and Lance started their first grow in Ben’s basement. They relied on a 4’x4’ grow tent to get them started. From the very beginning, the mushrooms were a hit. Soon, friends, family, neighbors, and co-workers were clamoring over how tasty the mushrooms were and demand took off. By 2020, they were ready to expand their operations and buildout a new production facility, but Covid-19 hit and put all plans on hold. However, they used this extra time to pour more innovation and strategy into their cutting-edge facility designs. In two short years (minus Covid 2020), Ben and Lance took Colorado Mushrooms from a tiny, basement operation to a fully scaled, stand-alone indoor farm. Today, they supply their fresh, gourmet mushrooms to Denver/Boulder-area chefs, restaurants, grocers, CSAs, and farmers markets. OUR PROCESS
At Colorado Mushrooms LLC, simplicity, consistency, and sustainability are key. The process starts with our proprietary substrate blend. We begin by mixing agricultural byproducts: soybean hulls (from Colorado soybean farms), sawdust (from Colorado sawmills using Colorado forest products), and Colorado water (from the South Platte River Basin alluvial aquifer). The ratios must be just right: if anything is off – even just a bit – the production will suffer, or the mushrooms may not grow at all. The precise amount of the proprietary substrate blend is loaded into specialized cultivation bags and undergoes a pasteurization process by bringing the bags up to a specific temperature for a set amount of time to kill off harmful competitors of colonizing mycelium. Once the bags are pasteurized, they are moved into our laboratory where we inoculate the mushroom spawn into the substrate. Spawn is used by mushrooms growers much like seeds are used by farmers and gardeners. It is the genetic material used to grow mushrooms and is the backbone to any mushroom farm. Unlike seeds, though, mushroom spawn is grown from selected genetics and cloned for consistent production of a particular cultivar of mushroom. Seeds (and spores for that matter!) are a genetic grab-bag dependent on two individual sets of genetic material, while spawn is a single genetic culture that can be propagated indefinitely from the same ‘master’. The ‘master’ cultures are kept on agar petri dishes in our laboratory. The bags move from the lab to colonization shelves where they sit for 2-4 weeks. Over this time, the mushrooms “root-system”, called mycelium, spreads throughout the substrate. Once completely colonized, the bags are cut open, exposing the colonized substrate to the oxygen needed to produce mushroom bodies, and moved into the fruiting room. Our mushroom fruiting room has been designed with the precise temperature, light, humidity, and airflow for optimum mushroom growth. After a couple of weeks, the mushrooms are hand-picked to achieve balance of flavor and shelf-life, with the consumer’s needs in mind. We then hand-package and hand-deliver, whether to restaurants, wholesale buyers, or our local grocers and farmer’s markets.
