Our food-safety practice.

Why sterility is not a marketing claim here

Every substrate block is pressure-sterilised before it is inoculated. That step exists because mushroom cultivation is really an exercise in growing one organism and excluding every other one — a contaminated block is a lost block, visible within days. A farm with poor process hygiene does not produce unsafe mushrooms so much as it produces no mushrooms. The economics enforce the practice.

The cold chain

Mushrooms are cut in the cool of the morning and into the cold room within the hour, held at 34–38°F, and moved in insulated boxes on the same day. There is no warehouse stage and no overnight hold. Every box carries the harvest date, and on wholesale boxes the harvest time is written on in pen — which is the single most useful traceability detail a receiving cook can have.

Harvest and handling

• Hand-harvested with knives, sanitised between rooms, not pulled by hand.
• Dry-harvested and never washed. Water is both a spoilage risk and a quality problem; clean substrate indoors means there is nothing to wash off.
• Single-use or sanitised food-grade containers, with no reuse of anything that has been in a customer’s kitchen.
• Hand hygiene and gloves at pack-out, and nobody works a harvest morning while ill.
• Rooms cleaned between cycles, with spent blocks removed from the growing area entirely rather than stacked nearby.

Inputs

No pesticides, no fungicides, no growth regulators, at any stage. This is not a virtue claim — a fungicide in a mushroom farm kills the crop. Substrate is hardwood sawdust and bran; the only other inputs are water and filtered air.

Ask for the harvest date, the storage temperature, and what happens to a contaminated block. Any grower who cannot answer all three quickly is not running a process you want in your kitchen.

Species identification — the honest bit

Everything we sell is cultivated from known commercial strains, propagated from documented culture, and grown indoors on sterilised substrate. There is no foraged product in the commercial line and no wild-collected mushroom in any box that goes to a restaurant or a Share member. Where we write about wild fungi it is educational, clearly labelled as such, and it never becomes inventory.

What we will send a kitchen on request

Product list with species names and strains, harvest and delivery schedule, cold-chain and packaging description, insurance documentation, and a written statement of practice for your own HACCP file. Institutional and campus buyers usually need the last two — that route is covered on institutional sourcing.

Allergens and handling advice for customers

Mushrooms are not a major allergen, but a minority of people react to specific species, and raw or undercooked mushrooms are harder to digest for almost everybody. Cook all gourmet mushrooms thoroughly — beech mushrooms in particular are unpleasant raw. Reishi is not a culinary mushroom at all; see the reishi page.

Common questions