Voila! Raglan-Franco venture turns coffee into pink mushrooms

Oyster mushroom growing in spent coffee grounds. Photo / Supplied

Raglan, town of surfers, artisans, beach and cafe worshippers - and now, exotic edible pink mushrooms grown in their daily coffee grounds due to a couple of French entrepreneurs.

This taste of the "blue economy" - which is much more sustainable than the green economy according to proponents - is the work of Champignons, a year-old company founded by two French settlers in the Waikato who are growing gourmet mushrooms using spent coffee collected daily from the seaside mecca's cafes and restaurants.

Having recently completed their mushroom farm at Raglan's nationally-recognised zero waste community enterprise Xtreme Zero Waste, business partners Niels Kolmer and Vanessa Macdonald are now selling their "flamingo" oyster mushrooms in local stores, at farmers' markets and to top Hamilton restaurants.

They've spent a year refining science and production techniques, with the objective of producing the mushrooms all year long while minimising energy consumption and production waste.

The growing process doesn't use the single-use plastic broadly used in the mushroom industry, saves spent coffee from the local hospitality sector going to landfill, and works without the usual need for sterilisation of the mushroom-growing media, saving energy.

Kolmer, a material science engineer who came to New Zealand with his research chemist wife Pauline Sallet last year seeking adventure, and Macdonald, who was pursuing a business opportunity, did not know each other before meeting in Cambridge last year.

Macdonald is a keen follower of the blue economy principle - sustainable use of resources for economic growth, improved livelihoods and jobs and ocean ecosystem health - and both were fans of upcycling, the process of bringing a material back in its production cycle at an upper level in the supply chain.

Champignons director Niels Kolmer. Photo / Supplied

Upcycling can be repeated in perpetuity, say the pair. In contrast, they say, recycling is merely prolonging the inevitable by stretching out the waste stream and slightly decreasing the life cycle costs of the material.

The outcome of them combining their sustainability thinking was the flamingo mushroom-coffee grounds venture, which Kolmer believes is the first of its kind in the country.

"New Zealand has very strict rules about importing oyster mushrooms - only two kinds are allowed, flamingo and grey," he said.

Flamingo grows better in warmth and grey in cold, and because the venture wants to grow all year round, it was more commercially efficient to grow the pink variety, which Kolmer said not only "looks amazing" but is tastier than the grey oyster mushroom.

Coffee grounds are rich in nutrients, mainly potassium and phosphorous but also 30 others including sodium, magnesium, calcium and sulphur - nutrients which are essential to the growth and vitality of plants, he said.

The business has yet to make a profit being in the first of a two step development stage, said Kolmer.

The mushrooms retail at up to $8 for 100gms.

He declined to discuss the investment so far.

The objective by the end of this year is to up cycle more than half a tonne of used coffee grounds every month - the equivalent of 800 flat whites a day - to produce more than 30kg of mushrooms a week.

The second stage, hopefully to be launched next year, is to produce growing kits for children. Inherent in this stage will be education about the importance of protecting the ecosystem, he said.

After mushrooms are harvested, what's left of the growing material is fed into Raglan's Xtreme Zero Waste composting facility where worms transform it into compost to enrich soils sold by the enterprise.