Demand For Fresh Mushrooms Surging
March 23, 2018 | 2 min to read
Avondale, PA — Consumer demand for fresh mushrooms is reaching new highs already in early 2018, as mushrooms top popular food trends lists and star in national foodservice advertising campaigns, such as the Sonic Drive-In promotion. At retail, the mushroom category ended January 2018 with a 9.7 percent increase in pounds sold, following a 5.7 percent increase in January 2017. The surge in demand is outpacing current supply, with various factors affecting how quickly mushroom growers can respond, according to the American Mushroom Institute.
“While mushroom production is a year-round process, the industry is still subject to seasonal supply and demand gaps,” said Mark Lang, Ph.D., professor of Food Marketing at Saint Joseph’s University. “Demand has been steadily growing across all categories – foodservice, retail and industrial – for several years, challenging the mushroom industry to continue to look for ways to meet the demand in a smart, sustained fashion.”
Long term expansion entails significant capital expense for new buildings and infrastructure, let alone time, thus in the short term, growers are focused on increasing current growing capacity. According to the 2017 National Agriculture Statistics Service report, over the last four years, mushroom growers have modified production methods to increase mushroom yield per square foot.
However, like all agriculture, the industry is facing a labor shortage. Mushroom growing is highly labor-intensive – harvesting takes place 365 days a year and every mushroom is currently harvested by hand. Weather has been another challenge in meeting the surging demand. Even though mushrooms are grown indoors in climate-controlled buildings, the composting process takes place outdoors where continued cold temperatures and wet conditions are affecting the process which produces the substrate used to grow mushrooms. Significant weather events such as Nor’easters and consistent cold, even for a few days, can also affect supply. Several storms and cold weather recently have hit the east coast, where the majority of the nation’s mushroom production occurs.
# # #
About AMI
The American Mushroom Institute (AMI), headquartered in Avondale, Pennsylvania, is a national voluntary trade association representing the growers, processors and marketers of cultivated mushrooms in the United States and industry suppliers worldwide. For more information, visit www.americanmushroom.org.
Source: The American Mushroom Institute (AMI)