USA
Chris Bailey en Glenn Walker (r) of Gourmet Mushrooms.
John Kidder shows the Amycel variety collection.
loose grains, so it cannot always be made in the conventional way. It also has a more limited storage period than grain spawn, so speed spawn has to be used as quickly as possible into order to maximise its potential for speed. Similar to the majority of large spawn compa- nies, Amycel also uses bulk vacuum heating and cooling to produce spawn. The batch size at Amycel is 2000 litres and the batch treatment time from heating to cooling takes 75 minutes, after which the batch is inoculated with the required strain. After bagging the bags are sealed and taken to the incubation rooms. Amycel also runs an extensive test programme to test spawn lines. They use liquid nitrogen to store their variety collection.
The enormous Monterey Mushrooms plant in Watsonville.
The next day, we visited the research depart- ment at Amycel where we were welcomed by Steve Lander, who has been responsible for maintaining existing strains and developing new ones for 20 years. He was behind the highly successful Amycel strain Heirloom, a hybrid strain that represents a breakthrough for improving the production capacity of brown mushrooms. Steve spoke in great detail about the breeding programme and explained about obtaining the patents and variety protection that make it financially interesting for breeders to develop and market new varieties of mushrooms (see MB67). He also discussed the production of vitamin D by mushrooms under the influence of exposure to UV light. There is currently a high demand for this kind of product in the USA.
Monterey Mushrooms Inc. in Watsonville
Kyle, Toby und John Garrone (ltr) of Far West Fungi, our hosts in the SF region.
Following Amycel, we visited the Monterey Mushrooms Inc. headquarters and one of its production farms, where John Kidder was once again our convivial host. Monterey was founded in 1971 as a family-owned and operated farm in Royal Oaks, CA. Nowadays, it is a vertically integrated company active in all aspects of mushroom production from seed to consumer. With 10 mushroom growing farms strategically located throughout north America, it is the larg- est mushroom company in the USA. It supplies fresh mushrooms to supermarkets, foodservice, canned and frozen mushroom processors. We were shown round by Matt Fuller (head of quality control) and saw the entire company – from where compost is made right up to where the mushrooms are prepared for dispatch. The plant is enormous, and 600 tons of phase I are produced a week in the ‘old fashioned way’. The material is mixed with tractor loaders outdoors on a wharf, formed into a flat rectangular pile left for seven days and watered. Then pushed
32 MUSHROOM BUSINESS
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