The Genuinely Interested Podcast Ep 130 Andrew Carter - The Future of Mushrooms
Andrew Carter is the co-founder and CEO of Smallhold.
Andrew is a greenhouse and vertical farming specialist, he builds controlled environments and has been doing urban agriculture projects for years. Most of his background is in commercial greenhouse and vertical farm systems. together with his co-founder Adam DeMartino they built Smallhold.
Smallhold is on a mission to dramatically shorten the distance between you and fresh, gourmet mushrooms. They have a network of organic indoor farms where they ship fresh mushrooms. They also have installations in supermarkets and restaurants where you can pick fresh mushrooms on the spot. They want to shift the definition of locally grown foods to represent foods grown locally, not 500 miles away.
Andrew and I discussed:
- What Smallhold means
- Could this model of growing food be the future of supermarkets
- Health benefits of mushrooms
- Their different revenue streams/verticals
- The recent surge in interest in mushrooms
- How they efficiently grow their mushrooms
- Why COVID was a massive spike in business for them
- The mechanics of indoor growing
- Who leads the world in mushroom growing
And So much more...
My Take: There is so much innovation that is occurring in the food space that it is hard to know what our food system will look like in 10 years. With so much focus on sustainability, organic products, less water usage, and reducing carbon emissions & plastic consumption, I am extremely interested and cautiously optimistic about what the future of food of our food is going to look like.