THE MORELS OF WINTER: Western Michigan facility grows the fabled morels and other exotic mushrooms indoors, year-round
November 30, 2005 - freep.com
A man came into Papa Joe's Marketplace in Rochester Hills a few weeks ago, produce manager Arkan Gargees recalls, and asked for dried morel mushrooms. As virtually every Michigander knows, fresh ones are available only in the spring, when they pop up in the woods.
"I told him, 'I've got them fresh.' And he said, 'Where are they? Where are they?' And he bought the last three packages I had," Gargees recounted.
And that was at $12.99 for each 3.5-ounce box.
That's the kind of story Gary Mills and Kris Berglund love hearing.
Mills holds the patent on the process to grow morels indoors, a feat once thought impossible. With backing from Toyota Motor Corp. and other investors, he and Berglund are growing the highly prized fungi and four other exotic mushrooms in a massive new facility in western Michigan, using local forest products such as sawdust, bark and composted leaves.
Sold under the name Woodland Exotics, the mushrooms are showing up in markets in metro Detroit, Lansing, Battle Creek and Chicago. So far, they're getting an enthusiastic reception.
"These were very clean, not like the ones from the fields," said produce manager Joe Moses of Holiday Market in Royal Oak. He bought eight packages of morels and eight packages of mixed varieties the first week they were available and sold out in a weekend. "I definitely want more," he added.
Mills and Berglund, both scientists with ties to Michigan State University, are eager to oblige. In fact, they believe their fledgling company, Diversified Natural Products Inc. in Scottville, near Ludington, can become the Midwest's major supplier of specialty, or exotic, mushrooms.
"We'll harvest 16,000 pounds a week at full capacity, and about 3,000 pounds will be morels. We're already ramping up pretty fast," says Berglund. They opened the 200,000-square-foot facility in late April and hope to be in full swing by spring.
Besides their morels -- a mild-flavored strain -- they grow shiitake and oyster mushrooms, plus two that are even more unusual: the tan-colored Black Poplar, which is grown in Europe, and the vivid orange Cinnamon Nameko, which is the second-most popular mushroom in Japan, Mills says.
Although they're largely unknown here, that's beginning to change. Mills says he saw chef Mario Batali sauteing a pan of Namekos on an "Iron Chef" episode a few weeks ago.
While the company does offer morels separately, it plans to market its mushrooms mainly as a mixture of all five types. Mixing them will help the company deal with uneven crop yields, but mostly, it's a way to stand out at the produce counter.
No one else offers shoppers such an eye-catching mix of colors and shapes, all clearly visible through the plastic container -- and nobody else has morels, period.
"We're the only ones who can produce that particular species of mushroom on a commercial basis," Berglund says.
They aren't interested in growing ordinary white button mushrooms and their brown cousins, cremini and Portobello. Says Mills, "Our whole idea is to sell what other people don't."
Mills and Berglund grow food, use soil, plant things and hope for good crops. They even have a tractor. But only in the most 21st Century sense could these high-tech specialists be called farmers.
"This is not like weekend gardening," says Berglund, who has been at MSU since 1984 and is designated a university distinguished professor. "It's a very, very advanced process we're using -- a serious biochemical process."
The microscopic inoculate, the "seed," that starts the growing process, is created in the laboratory from proprietary strains of morel material cryo-preserved at minus-80-degrees Celsius. As the mushrooms grow over about 12 weeks, they are kept in a series of climate-controlled rooms with different levels of heat, humidity and light. A chemical engineer, Berglund looks for new uses for forest and agricultural products that the company can develop in two areas: gourmet and functional foods, and plant-based fuels and chemicals, both of which interested their Japanese investors, he notes.
The $10.5-million company obtains all its raw materials within a 50-mile radius and employs 56 people in a community hit hard by plant closings, including the abandoned green-bean processing complex that DNP bought, retrofitted and expanded.
It's Mills who is the mushroom expert. "He has learned to think like a morel," Berglund says. "He knows what it wants."
Even so, it has taken the PhD mycologist almost 20 years to turn the morel patent into what, finally, appears to be a viable business.
In the early '90s, a pilot project in East Lansing closed after its chief backer, Domino's Pizza, ended many of its outside investments. Next came a morel-growing operation in Alabama that closed after its parent corporation was purchased by another company.
Says Berglund, "It has taken a long time to reduce the ideas to practice in a correct business model," including the right product mix, location, facilities and financial backing.
Now, seven months after start-up, they're producing about 3,000 pounds of mushrooms a week. Midsummer Exotics are in some Whole Foods and independent markets in metro Chicago, as well as about 30 Meijer stores and numerous specialty markets here and in Lansing and Battle Creek.
If all goes well, the company's retail outlets will increase along with its production -- and with consumer demand.
Chef Brian Polcyn of Five Lakes Grill in Milford, who buys wild morels from foragers all over the state every spring, tried morels from the Domino's pilot project years ago, he says, but they didn't taste like his favorite wild black morels, the most robust type. He hasn't cooked with the latest ones, he says, but he would be willing to try them.
"It comes down to what they taste like," he says. "If they've developed a way to make them taste like real wild mushrooms, they'll have a gold mine."
Mills and Berglund are confident that's exactly what they have.
They are a milder-tasting strain, Mills says, but they have performed well in side-by-side taste tests. And they do have two other important advantages over wild-harvested ones: They're grown in clean, bug-free conditions and they're available all year.
"People who want to hunt morels are going to go out and hunt morels, but in the middle of July," he says, "guess who they're going to get morels from."
Quote:
How to turn cells into morels
At Diversified Natural Products Inc. in Scottville, growing morels requires many steps, perfect conditions and advanced scientific techniques.
The process starts with a substrate, or growing medium, made of leaf and bark composts, plus a second medium of steamed wheat mixed with sugar and yeast. The wheat is the food for the morel's first stage of growth.
Each day, 600 one-gallon starter bags of substrate are prepared by hand, with a layer of wheat on the bottom and compost on top. The bags are wheeled into a walk-in steel chamber, where they're sterilized to kill organisms that might hinder the growth process.
After cooling, the compost is sprinkled with wheat grains covered in morel inoculate -- the microscopic cells that start the growing process.
The inoculate is continuously produced in DNP's high-tech lab, which features HEPA filters, biohazard hoods to kill contaminants, and a cryo-freezer where the company's proprietary stock cultures are held at minus-80 degrees Celsius.
After being inoculated, the bags of compost and wheat are set in a climate-controlled room.
There, over the next five to six weeks, the inoculate will grow white, weblike strands that reach down through the dark compost and into the nutrient-rich wheat at the bottom of the bag. At the end of this stage, the web-filled compost will have solidified into a black, rock-like mass called a sclerotia.
The sclerotia is broken into chunks and planted in trays of soil. Over the next six weeks, the trays are moved through a series of rooms with varying levels of heat, light and humidity.
Ten to 12 weeks after being started, a new crop of brown, elongated, crinkly-capped morels is ready for harvest.
DNP's other strains of mushrooms are less labor intensive, because they grow in the bags in which they're first planted, but like the morels, all require individual handling and carefully controlled growing conditions.