Figures and details

Hey guys!

I’m Viktor from Sweden. I’ve been looking at starting a smaller growing operation since I took my PDC with Richard Perkins about 2 years ago and he showed me what you we’re doing at what was then fungi futures.

So I have already experimented with growing on coffee and am hoping I could solicit some more detailed info from you guys here in the course 🙂

Given that my largest constrains are time to collect the coffee and grow space (most swedish cities have rather few unused buildings still), I’ve been inclined to focus on replicating the grow-kit that you have been doing for some time. Since there wasn’t really anything about them in the course I figured maybe I can bring it up here.

So, I would love to get some numbers to break down costs and revenue of doing a grow-kit operation. We’ve made some preliminary calculations but I guess you must have some pretty hard figures. Would you be willing to share that here on the course too? Of course figures would vary, not only between UK and Sweden but from place to place and given what network one has but ballpark numbers would help.

– How much do you pay for the cardboard box and did you get it made for you or did you do artwork on a standard box?
– Are you using unicorn bags and what size? How much are you paying for the bags? (I did a small order and payed around €0.6/bag /w shipping.)
– What weight are the grow-kits? They look like around 2kg but it’s hard to tell 🙂
– Roughly what weight (non-dry) mushrooms do you expect from a kit?
– Do you have a calculated “max grow-kits per square meter” ratio? (Given that you space vertically with around 2 meters to the ceiling)
– Do you have a success ratio on the kits? Do you offer refunds or send a new kit if someone was not able to grow mushrooms?
– Have you tried doing Golden Oyster (Pleurotus Citrinopileatus) with grow-kits? (I really like the color and wonder if they wouldn’t do quite ok given that they will fruit on tabletops in fairly well insulated houses here)
– Have you got a cost breakdown of the kits with additives (like the lime) and materials?
– How has demand for the grow-kits been? Has it slowed after the novelty value for close networks were off?

It would be great to get some help on these things as my trials are still only getting started and I am still looking for affordable space to set up shop. Given that mycelial growth can be done in dark with relatively low humidity it seems the kits would make for a more lean startup then trying to go for straight production. Also looking at prices here, it seems that the margins on kits seem quite a bit higher than that of selling just fruitbodys. Even other Swedish – semi-local (the standard definition of local in sweden is national…) – oyster is priced around €8-9 per kilo so doing something small here seems pretty hard economically.

Thanks for making the videos!