By OLIVIA BERGMEIER
Salina Post
In a shop just outside Minneapolis, Kan. a pair of agriculture entrepreneurs cultivate dozens of pounds of mushrooms each week, ranging from the cloud-like Lion's Mane to the flavorful Shitake.
Rachel and Casey Andre began Shroom-Mates in 2022 after noticing a "mushroom-sized gap" in the Saline County food industry.
"We had already talked about starting a farm and what we'd like to do, but the conventional way was kind of out of our means as far as land," Casey Andre said. "So we just said, 'Okay, what can we grow here and start here and expand — what's not available in the community?' So I went to the farmers market and saw nobody was doing mushrooms."
From there, the couple started small with a homemade cultivating tent, a special enclosure to grow mushrooms on a larger scale.
The makeshift tent first filled their entire basement, but after demand grew, they moved to a shop with an upgraded cultivating tent.
Rachel Andre has worked as a chef most of her life. As she sought to create more delicious recipes at the Rennaisance Cafe, she encountered a challenge in finding varying types of mushrooms beyond Portobello or Button mushrooms.
She and Casey Andre then found a solution — growing their own mushrooms in their basement to sell and use for recipes. This also aligned with the couple's goal of starting an agriculture business.
Rachel Andre said she worked as the executive chef at Rennaisance Cafe in Assaria for seven years, and she continues to assist the cafe occasionally but remains busy with Shroom-Mates.
"It's more science than it is agriculture," Casey Andre said. I work at Great Plains, so I'm in the ag industry. I grew up on a farm. We wanted to do something that promoted local agriculture and local foods — we're really into that."
Once the couple began growing mushrooms, they dove into the entire process, from sterilizing the substrate to pulling and washing mushrooms from the grow bags.
The process begins with filling plastic bags with a mix of wood chips and soy meal and then taking them to a sterilizing room to prevent mold growth.
After Casey and Rachel Andre sterilize the growing bags, the bags sit until the substrate turns white with mycelium, or the root-like structure of fungi, to then take to the cultivation tents.
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In the cultivation tents, the Andres can control the temperature, light and humidity to create the perfect environment for large heads of Lion's Mane and Oyster mushrooms to grow.
Casey Andre said he enjoys the challenge of growing mushrooms on a business scale.
"It motivates me and gets me interested in it all," Casey Andre said. "I went from knowing almost nothing about mushrooms, other than what you find at the grocery store, and I started looking into these wood-loving mushrooms, and I was like, 'Wow! There's so many kinds of these.'"
Beyond selling fresh mushrooms, the business sells mushroom teas and dried mushrooms, which have medicinal benefits from mushrooms like Lion's Mane.
The couple also invented the name Shroom-Mates. Casey Andre said that while researching other small mushroom businesses, he found many had "serious" names like "Last Name Mushrooms," and he wanted to do something different.
That's when Rachel Andre created the name Shroom-Mates as a play on words to draw people to their stall at local farmers' markets.
Rachel and Casey Andre set up shop this week at the Mid America Farm Expo at Tony's Pizza Events Center in town, selling boxes of fresh mushrooms alongside bags and jars of various dried mushrooms and teas.