Back to the Roots: Mushrooming into Sustainable Success

A cou­ple months before grad­u­a­tion, we were in a busi­ness ethics class, and our pro­fes­sor had this thought that you could pos­si­bly grow gourmet mush­rooms in recy­cled cof­fee grounds. It was a les­son about sus­tain­abil­ity. Alex and I didn’t know each other at the time, but some­thing about that struck us both. The pro­fes­sor put Alex and me in touch with each other, and that’s how we met up.”

For the two of them it was a true inspi­ra­tion. “We both had other pas­sions that we really loved, but we never knew how to apply them to a busi­ness,” Nikhil explained. “I spent six months of my junior year in Ghana and West Africa work­ing on a recy­cling pro­gram and was into sus­tain­abil­ity. Alex had just started one of the biggest one-on-one men­tor­ship pro­grams on cam­pus, con­nect­ing a lot of local ele­men­tary school stu­dents with men­tor­ship. With the mush­room idea, we found a way to do good work through busi­ness, and I think that’s why we both got excited about it and decided to jump into it. It was def­i­nitely a 180-degree shift in what we were doing.”

Off with a Bang

And jump into it they did. They imme­di­ately hit up their local Peet’s Coffee, which was only too happy to get rid of cof­fee grounds in a more pos­i­tive way than con­tin­u­ously con­tribut­ing to a land­fill. Alex’s fra­ter­nity turned into a test lab, and three months later their fledg­ling mush­room farm busi­ness, Back to the Roots, was founded.

At first, they were sim­ply grow­ing mush­rooms and sell­ing them locally. “When we started off, we walked into the Berkeley Whole Foods with a paint bucket of mush­rooms,” Nikhil related. “We had no expe­ri­ence or con­nec­tions to any­thing in retail and didn’t know what was going on. We went to the first guy we saw in the pro­duce bar, some­one just pack­ing the veg­eta­bles. We told him we were grow­ing mush­rooms in cof­fee grounds, and he thought it was pretty cool. He sent us to some­one else, and we ended up being passed around the whole store—we must have talked to 7–10 peo­ple that day.”

“We Want to Do It Ourselves!”

That trip into Whole Foods ended up get­ting their mush­room farm off the ground—but it turned out that many indi­vid­u­als they encoun­tered wanted some­thing else. “We had a lot of peo­ple ask­ing if they could come by and visit our farm,” Nikhil con­tin­ued. “And they’d say, ‘Hey, that’s kind of cool, but how could we do it our­selves? Can I take one of your bags and do it at home or some­thing like that?’ So we decided to launch a kit.”

The ini­tial effort wasn’t so much of a suc­cess. “Our first ones were these big bulky plas­tic bags the size of a bas­ket­ball that we could barely sell at a farm­ers’ mar­ket,” Nikhil said, laugh­ing. “I remem­ber a Whole Foods buyer say­ing, ‘It’s a cool con­cept, but that’s dis­gust­ing! Get that out of my face!’ We real­ized that the idea was there but we had to make it look good too, because peo­ple were afraid of fungus—they didn’t want to put a big bag of fun­gus on their kitchen table.”

A bit of research and design later, the cur­rent neat kit was born. It looks a lot like a milk car­ton, but it’s actu­ally a self-contained mini–mushroom farm that will pro­duce a 1½-pound crop of pearl oys­ter mush­rooms in 10 days.

And this ver­sion has indeed been a hit. Alejandro and Nikhil began by get­ting into Whole Foods Market, store by store, con­duct­ing demon­stra­tions and sell­ing shop­pers on the idea. It wasn’t long before Whole Foods Market decided to launch the kit nationally—and the two inno­va­tors haven’t looked back.

“It’s been a lot of fun this past year,” Nikhil said. “A big ques­tion mark was, can we sell these kits out­side of the nat­ural food space? It’s been a really excit­ing expe­ri­ence to see that we can; we’re sell­ing them now in Home Depot, Nordstrom, Bed Bath and Beyond, and we launch in ToysRUs in March. It’s quite remark­able to dis­cover that if you can design some­thing well and then make it fun and easy, a lot of peo­ple can get into it.”

Click any image to enlarge.

In addi­tion to uti­liz­ing a sub­stan­tial waste stream (cof­fee grounds) in their prod­uct, they are also giv­ing back in other ways. For exam­ple, unused mush­room kits that don’t achieve the qual­ity grade make a fan­tas­tic soil amend­ment, which they have given away to schools for gar­dens and sold on the retail mar­ket in their Northern California region.

Self-Cleaning Fish Tank/Herb Garden

Alejandro and Nikhil are launch­ing a new prod­uct now—one which, like their mush­room kit, also teaches con­sumers about sus­tain­abil­ity and grow­ing food through an entic­ing small pack­age. “We’re launch­ing a home aquapon­ics kit,” Nikhil said. “We’ve had incred­i­ble response to the idea. It’s a lit­tle fish tank, and basi­cally the fish waste is upcy­cled as a fer­til­izer for plants such as herbs, baby greens or spinach, which are planted on top. The plants in turn are clean­ing the water, so it’s like a self-cleaning fish tank—you never have to clean the water. And there’s no soil or chem­i­cal fer­til­izer needed; it just grows totally on all the rich nutri­ents in
the water.”

The kit comes with every­thing but the fish—however, included are coupons for free fish that can be redeemed at pet retailers.

Alejandro and Nikhil have most def­i­nitely found their (not-so-small) niche. “Our whole vision is mak­ing food per­sonal again,” Nikhil con­cluded. “It’s like, how can we get peo­ple to expe­ri­ence con­nect­ing to their food by either grow­ing or cre­at­ing it, and have it be easy and fun? We want our brand to be acces­si­ble to many more peo­ple than just those who already get it. Our chal­lenge is to make it look really, really good. A per­son may not care about aquapon­ics, for exam­ple, but they might just want some­thing beau­ti­ful in their home. They buy our prod­uct because of that; then they can learn about it.”

For more infor­ma­tion, please visit www.backtotheroots.com.