Yyou can’t walk more than a few aisles in the grocery store these days without running into some kind of new mushroom product. Fresh white button mushrooms are increasingly being joined by specialty varieties such as mane, maitake or oyster mushrooms. There is sparkling cordyceps tea and chaga coffee that boasts a range of health benefits, mushroom crisps and even chocolate bars infused with reishi.
Mushrooms are steady growth in popularity in the US over the past decade, said Eric Davis, a representative of the Mushroom Council. Mushrooms often top food trend lists and are even rated as “component of the year” in 2022 by the New York Times. According to consumer consulting company Circana, grocery store sales of fresh mushrooms have increased 20% in the past decade, while sales of specialty mushrooms have doubled in the same time frame.
A few years ago we said ‘mushrooms are definitely having a moment at the moment, let’s enjoy it.’ Here we are three or four years later, and it’s still happening,” Davis said.
So what is behind the craze that has allowed mushrooms to maintain such momentum?
Meet the mushroompreneurs
As co-founder of Small holdings, the most famous purveyor of specialty mushrooms in the US, Andrew Carter had a front row seat to this mushroom moment. Although Smallhold has grown varieties such as blue oysters and dandelions on indoor farms since 2017, the company’s founders saw a turning point during the 2020 lockdowns, when they moved from selling their produce to restaurants in Brooklyn to selling directly to consumers. .
“Average consumption of mushrooms in the country at that time was something like 2 pounds per person per year,” Carter said. “But our customers bought 5 pounds once a week … it just showed how much room there is to inject more mushrooms into someone’s diet.”
Just a few years later, Smallhold products are carried in more than 1,000 grocery stores across the country. Smallhold was joined by a variety of brands selling mushrooms to an increasingly mycologically curious American public.
Of course, mushrooms are not new to everyone’s palate. Growing up Chinese American, mushrooms were a standard part of Marilyn Yang’s diet, and one that made fun of her as a child (China is the world’s leading producer of mushrooms by a long shot). Seeing them take off as an adult made the food entrepreneur feel like “oh, people are finally catching up,” she said. Now she is helping to spread her lifelong love of mushrooms Popadelicsthe snack company he co-founded, which sells mushroom chips in flavors like Parmesan Truffle and Thai Chili.
“There’s no reason mushrooms can’t be as good a carrier of flavor as a potato chip or tortilla chip can be,” she said. “It’s just about introducing people to different ways mushrooms can be used.” After launching in spring 2022, the brand is now stocked in more than 600 retail partners nationwide.
A (food) star is born
If you ask five different people how a food becomes part of the zeitgeist, you might get five different answers.
It would be easy to suspect that well-funded marketing campaigns from industry lobby groups might play a role – think the ubiquitous Got Milk? ads from the 1990s and 2000s, sponsored by the dairy lobby. And the Mushroom Board certainly tried its best to encourage more mushroom eating. But as Alicia Kennedy points out in her book No Meat Required, sometimes products become popular in a much more organic – and mysterious – way.
Take kale, for example, which has gone from a garnish used by caterers to stage food displays to celebrated in a Beyoncé music video and even embrace (if briefly) by the likes of McDonald’s.
One version of the story of kale’s rise claims that it all came down to the work of one PR person who decided to print kale simply because she liked it. Another version, advocated by Elly Truesdell, a former trend spotter for Whole Foods and VC who invests in new food brands goes like this: Kale became popular because leading chefs like Dan Barber, of Blue Hill by Stone Barns fame, started using it. Errol Schweizer, a former grocer at Whole Foods, tells a different story: He thinks it all comes back to the 2006 E coli outbreak linked to prepackaged spinach. Kale has become an alternative option to fill a sudden void in nutrient-dense leafy greens.
There are at least as many stories to explain why mushrooms seem to pop up everywhere. From Carter’s perspective, the 2020 restrictions played a key role in encouraging people to experiment with new ingredients in their home cooking. And the way that period coincided with the success of films like Fantastic Fungi on Netflix and the growth in medical psilocybin research, has increased the public’s interest in mushrooms.
Truesdell also drew attention to the growing role that social media platforms play in whether or not a food catches on. “Colour, beauty and images are a big part of whether things really stick because we’re dealing with food so visually, and often on a screen,” she said. In a variety of otherworldly, visually striking forms, fresh mushrooms are photogenic in a way that gives them an edge in the digital age.
When mushrooms started to take off a few years ago, a number of factors kept them in the spotlight. The growing interest in looking for food and wild foodsin which mushrooms feature prominently – especially with unusual weather that “one-time crop trees” in recent years – may have helped. And pop culture phenomena like the TV show The Last of Us continued to capture the public’s imagination with mushroom-centric storylines.
From Davis’ perspective, it’s not so much that mushrooms are on trend, but that they fit into the broader food trends, or priorities, emerging for many Americans, including personal and planetary well-being. They are a hearty, umami-rich meat substitute. They are a generous source of vitamins, minerals, protein and fiber. And they can grow on waste material.
No silver bullet
However, other food trends offer something of a cautionary tale in treating any food as a panacea. Quinoa, avocados and almond milk have all been hailed as sustainability and health triumphs, but their sudden rise to prominence has sometimes coincided with a growing number of human rights abuses and water crises in their supply chains.
“When there’s a big spike in demand, there’s often going to be a level of irresponsibility about how that food gets to where it needs to go, given how the agricultural system works and the labor it relies on in large volumes,” he said. Truesdell said.
For now, even with mushrooms’ rise in popularity, Americans are nowhere near eating enough of them to put much real strain on existing systems, Davis said. (Truesdell, who describes food trends as moving through four stages—emergence, adoption, spread, and ultimately ubiquity—argues that mushrooms are only in the first or second stage in the U.S.) And the fact that the primary culinary varieties are grown indoors on discarded material such as sawdust, distinguishing them from crops such as quinoa or almonds, which need a lot of water and fertile soil to grow.
But for all the good eating more mushrooms might do, no ingredient, however healthy or sustainable, will fix America’s broken food system on its own, Schweizer noted.
“The trends are cool, and they’ve made some things better,” Schweizer said. “But in terms of reversing the systemic issues and inequalities we see in the food system, this has to be done at the policy level, underpinned by public organizing and pressure on the political system.”