We catch Chris Batlle of Mighty Cap Mushrooms on a busy Monday morning, when their lean and mighty staff get together to review the week. Like any small business owner, he is juggling a lot, so we’re grateful he took the time to sit with us.

Chris started the family business with his wife, Summer, bringing his extensive background in the food and wine industry to their mushroom farm in Central California. Located in Paso Robles, which translates to “pass of the oaks” (a nod to the heritage of the ancient trees that thrive there), Mighty Caps Mushrooms supplies fresh-grown culinary mushrooms to surrounding restaurants in the San Luis Obsispo County and ships a variety of 100% US grown functional mushroom grow kits nationwide.


CB: 

Mondays are pretty busy in the mornings because we kind of set the week. We meet in the grow rooms every morning during the week, but on Mondays there’s a lot of forecasting going on depending on what we picked over the weekend for our surplus. It usually isn’t that much, because we’re still kind of a smaller farm.

Then, we look in the grow rooms to see what’s ready to be picked off, and what will be ready on, say, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. That gives us a total amount of what we have to sell for the week.

Right now, we’re at a certain scale of production to what the facility can make on a weekly basis which averages 650-750 pounds.

I consider us a middle-sized operation. I think there’s about three active farms in our area that are much smaller. And the guys that sell at the farmers markets are doing 40-50 pounds a week. Some people have farms on their house property, but it’s a big jump to go from 50 pounds a week to 300 or 400 pounds. And then above us, you have the guys that are doing 20,000-100,000 pounds a week.

VK:

Oh, wow!

Is there something about Paso Robles that lends itself to growing mushrooms? 

CB: 

Nothing in particular, really.

I think in 2020, a lot of people were home and started to explore growing their own food. And

there was a huge growth in home farming, and in mushroom farms, that came out of that.

99% of them didn’t stick when they had to pay the bills and realized that this is really hard work. It’s very labor intensive. And there isn’t this huge profit margin. A lot of people say, “Oh, my gosh, man, you guys are killing it!” But the truth is, it’s a commodity, and the margins are tight. It’s a competitive business and requires a lot of manual labor. Once you really understand more about your size and scale, you can start mechanizing a little bit more and cut your labor costs a bit. But at our size and smaller, we need all the labor we can throw at it. In order to be a consistent mushroom farmer, we have to work seven days a week. Typically, a mushroom takes an average of about 30 days to grow – give or take the strain. So, we have 30 to 40 days worth of product growing all the time and we can’t afford to miss a day.

It’s also not seasonal on the cultivation side; it’s every day because we’re able to produce them indoors in a controlled environment.

So, when you’re a smaller farm, it’s hard to do the farmers market and grow a lot of mushrooms at the same time. A lot of people come in saying they want to grow mushrooms. The reality is that they need to secure eight farmer’s markets to create enough revenue to survive. If you try to do both for a very long period of time, you’ll burn out. That’s what happens on a smaller scale. We’ve had probably 15 farms that started in this area over the last four years, and there are only 1-2 that are still going strong.


VK: 

Farming, generally speaking, can be a punishing business – especially in CA. I recently spoke to a family farmer in the state, and she said something that really stuck with me. She said, “Farmers are the only people who buy retail and sell wholesale.” In order to make it as a farmer, you also have to be a business person and to look at the bottom line to make it a viable business.

Can you share a bit about how you were able to set yourself apart from the crowd and keep the farm going?

CB: 

I’ve been in the food industry for quite some time. A lot of my training came through me working for a really large company here on the West Coast, Santa Monica Seafood, which is a large wholesale distributor. I had a very unique position with them as a direct vessel purchaser. So, I was in charge of a huge team and managed the commercial fishing fleet on the West Coast – from San Diego to Monterey. 

But I was on the phone all the time, seven days a week, and was pretty much wired into this business, so a lot of what I learned there stuck with me. And I was able to create many relationships, not knowing that I would be growing mushrooms someday after working as a fishmonger.

After leaving the seafood industry, I went into wine, which was a natural transition since the wine industry in Paso Robles is humongous. So, I spent about five years as a Facilities Director for a fairly large winery, and then I decided that I needed a change of pace.

I’d always been into wild mushrooms, and I was always foraging on my hikes for personal use. 

Here in our area, it’s so seasonal. You may get a 2-month window when you can go pick wild mushrooms. Some years are good, and some years when there’s a drought, there won’t be very much to pick. 

So, while I was still working in wine, I felt called back by the food industry. I was still in communication with all the chefs I had worked with, and I came to realize that almost every single restaurant uses mushrooms! They might be on the menu or they’re being used in sauces and soups. But a lot of the stuff is being imported. There are some domestic growers, but they’re not really geared towards serving restaurants.

We were at home in 2018 when we first started to look into cultivation. At that time, we just wanted to grow for ourselves. We bought one of those home grow kits on Amazon, of all places, to just see what this thing’s all about. We started watering the block as a family (me, my wife, and two kids), and it just grew on our countertop. Then, we got to eat it. So, that really stuck with my wife and I.

From that experience, I started reading a ton of books on mycology, and really trying to understand cultivation better. I reached out to others online, and started watching some Youtube videos, and followed a bunch of mushroom farms on Instagram. I just knew we had to give it a try.

We started growing very low-tech in our backyard on straw. I was getting spawn from Aloha at the time, and they were super cool, helping me out because I was super green. I kind of knew what I was doing, but I’m really determined when I put my mind to something. So, we started growing about 5 to 10 pounds a week for personal use. We had a little tent in our garage, and we grew them on these compacted logs that we made, and they looked awesome! The kids were freaking out, and we decided we wanted to grow more. We started passing them out to friends and family. For the first six months, we grew about 5 to 10 pounds a week.

We also started learning more about the health benefits of it. We kind of knew about some of the benefits early on. But, one of the life events that triggered our decision to grow mushrooms in a more serious way was when my wife was diagnosed with colon cancer at 37 years old.

It really rocked the family. Thankfully, we caught it early enough. We decided then that mushrooms were going to be a staple protein and that we’re going to eat as much mushrooms as we can. And we still do. Every day, we eat them in some form.


VK:

What got you thinking that mushrooms could be beneficial after your wife’s diagnosis?

CB:

Well, we obviously can’t claim that they’re curing cancer. We get asked that question a lot, and we tell people they need to do their own research. But, some of the research that we found shows they can be helpful.

That, combined with a person’s mindset, both conscious and unconscious, can have a powerful placebo effect.

Bottom line is that we felt like they were helping us healthwise, and I can’t remember the last time I was sick. It’s been years, knock on wood, that my whole family have all been fairly healthy. 

We believe that mushrooms are healthy in multiple ways. They may help with blood sugar and cholesterol regulation, for example. Each of them plays a different role, and some do more than others, based on research.

We have 7 to 8 different strains of mushrooms to choose from each week, so we don’t get bored eating the same thing. Plus, the chefs appreciate the variety we supply. 

VK: 

That’s amazing. 

And in fact, there is a lot of research to back up the health benefits of mushrooms. There’s a great little book called Myco Medicinals by Paul Stamets that includes a lot of serious scientific studies. The book also talks about blending different varieties of mushrooms, to compound their health benefits. 

Both China and Japan have been using medicinal mushrooms in their hospitals for decades now in conjunction with cancer treatment. So, there is something to be said for that.

CB: 

Yeah. And the crazy thing is they’ve been around for so long. They just haven’t had the spotlight. 

The US is still so new to mushrooms, but look what’s happened in the last 3-4 years.

People aren’t as scared of them. There are still a lot of people that either like mushrooms, or they will not even touch them. Those people you can send to me, and I will turn them around. Most people grew up on the white button mushrooms at the salad bar that were raw. And just like anything, if there’s a food you had a bad experience with during childhood, you never go back to it. But mushrooms have so many different textures and flavors.

People also get hung up on the fact that some mushrooms are grown on manure. We don’t grow any manure-based substrate, so they’re more willing to try them out.

There are just so many stereotypes that come with mushrooms, and I just love educating people and giving them confidence about them. Coming from my background in the food industry, I know that a very small percentage of people actually eat seafood because it’s more expensive and because they’re intimidated by it. They don’t want to overcook it, or they don’t want to be wrong. I’m very in-your-face about mushrooms now, and I try to get people over that – to the point that we give quite a bit of free product out. If they don’t like it, it’s no skin off my back. But if they do, you know they’re going to come back. And they always come back, especially if they’re local. A lot of people will say, “I didn’t know they could taste like that!”

So many people don’t know how versatile mushrooms are. You can sauté them, smoke them,  roast them, and barbecue them. You can do anything with a mushroom that you can do with any other protein. So, it’s all about education.


VK: 

So, what are some of the mushrooms you are growing at this moment? 

CB: 

Currently, we’re growing King Trumpets, Chestnuts, we have various Oysters (pink, blue, black pearl, and brown Italian). We’re also growing Lion’s Mane and Shiitake.

We’re mostly a fresh market, but our dried market is slowly growing. We just don’t produce too much of the dried stuff. The only time we really produce dried product is if there’s some seasonality with the mushroom market. The summer tends to be a little bit slower on sales. If we have excess, we typically dry them in the sun first just to knock off the first part of the moisture, and then we finish them in the dehydrator. So, they get that vitamin D exposure. We sell them in 1-ounce and 3-ounce retail packages.

A lot of chefs take our dried product, as well. It’s something they just have in the pantry as a spice and use it for baking as well. They’ll grind the dried mushroom into a flour like substance, and mix it in with things like pizza dough or pasta dough. I personally use it on all of my steaks. I like to season with dried Shiitake and salt. It’s really really good. It crusts up on there, and adds that umami flavor.

We’re working on some new spice blends that we’re hoping to launch soon. It’s just another way to diversify the business and break away from the fresh market a little bit.

VK: 

That’s really smart.

Does that extend the shelf life of the mushrooms?

CB: 

We still have to put a shelf life on the label. But once it’s dehydrated, it honestly lasts forever.

I have jars of Chanterelles that I foraged 7-8 years ago that have aged really well. They’re still perfect, and they smell amazing. They hold so well when they’re dried.

VK: 

And the amazing thing about mushrooms is that, unlike with most other health foods, their potency only increases when they’re exposed to heat, right?

CB:

We’ve come across a lot of people who tell us they eat raw mushrooms all the time. That’s crazy. A lot of people don’t understand that they’re really not good for you raw. So, some people get an upset stomach because they’ve eaten raw mushrooms, and they’ll never eat a mushroom again, or they’ll think that they’re allergic. But they’re just eating it wrong.


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VK:

I want to go back to your comment about the slim profit margins in the food business.

I always wonder what compels you (and others like you) to go into this line of business, anyway? Particularly in California, restaurateurs and farms are so heavily regulated. Is it your love of feeding people that drives you?

CB: 

Well, there’s multiple reasons. For one, I am very passionate about feeding people, and I’m passionate about health. Being at the front end of that, and being able to provide these things to people is so meaningful for me. I also love educating people, and I have always loved the experience of where food takes you. I’m so proud to be supplying food to thousands of people, that can be traced to its origins. 

Having worked with so many fishermen and seeing how hard they worked on such tight margins inspires me. It’s super-expensive to run your own vessel, and you’re risking your life going out there. And it just feels purposeful to be a part of that.

Sometimes, I sit down with my wife Summer, and start calculating our deliveries and average portion sizes. I like numbers. And we wind up realizing that we’re feeding several thousand people a week with our mushrooms. How impactful is that? 

Also, the love that we get back from people fuels us to keep doing what we’re doing. We hear from tourists and locals who say, “We went to three restaurants in CA, and all of them were using your mushrooms… they were so good!”

So, to answer your question of why we like working so hard when we’re not making very much money… it keeps me alive every day. I’ve had some very well-paying high profile jobs in my career, in charge of hundreds of people, but it just wasn’t fulfilling for me. Taking care of

my own employees, and feeding their families, and paying their bills… there’s just so much more purpose to that than just clocking in and out and trying to take vacations when you can.

Sure, having the farm poses difficulties. It’s hard to break away most of the time. But as we get more efficient and grow a little bit bigger, we will see our time free up a bit. 

Soon, we’ll be moving into a new facility.

VK:

Is it currently your homestead that you’re growing the mushrooms on? 

CB: 

No, we live about 5 minutes from the farm on a 10 acre property, and we have three AirBnb homes on the property.

The landlord and his wife are good friends of ours, and they helped us get into this facility. So, we lease about 2,000 square feet of warehouse space from them, which is where the farm is located.

We’re located less than half a mile from downtown Paso Robles.

VK:

Are you originally from Paso Robles?

CB:

I moved up here in 2008, originally.

I was in Orange County before that for quite some time, and that’s where I met my wife – in Laguna. She was born up here in a small town called Avila Beach. I had no idea that the Central Coast even existed, but she brought me up here to visit family when we first started dating, and I thought, “Wow! This place is beautiful.” At that point, there were about 120 wineries in Paso. Now, there are over 400. Tourism has grown a lot.

We would vacation up here, and one day, she asked if I would ever consider moving. And so we did. Within the first year, we got married, bought a house, relocated, and had our first kid – this is how hardcore we are! I left my job in Orange County as a general contractor building custom 30 to 40-million-dollar beach homes. We were both just tired of it, so we started over.


VK: 

Sounds like you really followed your hearts, and made a great choice.

At the moment, are you shipping your mushrooms or selling them just locally?

CB:

What we’re producing now is absorbed every week in San Luis Obispo.

The other way to eat our mushrooms is to order one of our fancy grow kits. We ship those nationally.

VK: 

What would you recommend for the average person who’s just beginning to look into growing mushrooms? What are some of your least intimidating mushrooms to grow?

CB:

We have four different kits in stock regularly every week. Pink Oyster is probably the easiest one to grow. Then, we have the Italian Brown Oyster. The Blue Oyster and Lions Mane aren’t necessarily more difficult to grow. They just take longer, and people tend to associate that with difficulty.

VK: 

If someone lives in an apartment building or has a small space, is this something that they can grow inside?

CB: 

Yes, growing them inside is actually preferable. If you want to grow them outside, you can. But it’s going to require a little bit more work to keep them moist. So, we recommend growing them on your kitchen countertop in an area where you have the most air exchange and some indirect light. Then, during your morning routine, you’re right there, and you can just squirt it with a little bit of water. It takes anywhere from 7 to 14 days for the mushroom to start growing out of that box. And then you can harvest them. 

Our kits produce about a pound, sometimes a little more, on the first flush. After harvesting, you can try for a second flush in another 5 to 10 days, which will be about half the size of the first. But we don’t typically guarantee a second flush. Still, it’s a pretty good bang for your buck at 25 dollars per kit. And what’s cool about the grow kit is that it requires some attention, so it automatically is taking your energy, which then transcends into the food. Then, when you go to cook it, you think, “Hey, I grew this!”

VK: 

It also seems like a great way to get kids involved and eating healthy!

CB: 

The kids love it. They get so stoked on it. They fight over who’s going to spray in the morning, and who gets to spray at night. We’ve heard all kinds of stories. Sometimes, parents will buy two kits – one for each kid. The kits create stories and positive experiences, and they help people get more confident growing their own food. People are at home, cooking mushroom dishes that they normally wouldn’t try.


VK:

On your website, you mention how important it is for you to be a sustainable company. Can you tell us a little bit about what you all are doing to that end?

CB:

On the sustainability side, what intrigues us is just how little water is required to grow mushrooms.

One of the trivia questions I like to ask during our farm tours is, “How many gallons of water do you think it takes to grow a pound of mushrooms?”

We use less than half a gallon of water (plus, we use some water to humidify the rooms) to produce a bag of mushrooms that weigh about one and a half pounds – in 30 days. Obviously, as you scale up, you’re consuming more water, but that’s the relative rule of thumb for most cultivators. And so, that’s amazing. 

We also have an end-of-life program here on the farm. So, one of the things that we do is that we pick mushrooms once during the primary flush. We don’t do the second flush for multiple reasons. One reason is that the second flush takes up square footage, and produces only half as much product.

After our first flush, we have this viable, nutrient-rich substrate block that will keep producing mushrooms. So, we partnered up with another farm down the street called Mount Olive Organic Farm. And they come every single day to pick up about 3,000 pounds of spent blocks or spent substrate a week. That adds up really, really fast if it doesn’t go somewhere. So, all of our spent blocks go to their farm, and they have a very elaborate worm-casting program. They have these concrete bays, and they alternate by putting down a layer of our mushroom blocks, and then they add these wiggly red worms. They do this for multiple layers, and the worms eat up the mushroom blocks until the pile is about 3 to 4 feet high. They leave their castings behind, and it makes this beyond-rocket-fuel soil – the richest soil I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s so full of nutrients, it’s unbelievable. It’s like hyper-composting and moves really fast with the worms in there. They told me that since they started the program, they’re seeing 10 to 15% better yields on their farm overall.

And the bonus is that our end footprint is minimized by having it go back into the soil.


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VK:

I’d like to get into CA Assembly Bill (AB1833) with you a little bit. Can you tell us how you got involved in supporting this bill, and what would happen if it were to pass? 

CB:

We work with a fellow farm that’s just north of us, in Monterey. They actually have a couple of farms in Monterey and San Martin – they’re called Far West Fungi. Over the years, I’ve just met a lot of people in the mushroom industry, and this family has been super supportive of us in so many different ways. They’re a big farm – all domestic, and all organic. 

You wouldn’t think that a big farm like that would help out the smaller guys, but they have been super involved with us, mentoring us on how to scale. 

They’re heavily involved in the mushroom industry, and they brought up to me that they were going to try to push this bill forward and asked if we would like to join their efforts. So I said yes – in a heartbeat. They were the reason I learned how mushroom imports worked because their family has been involved in growing mushrooms since the seventies or eighties. They told me that for awhile now, mushroom imports had become an impediment to domestic growers. Imports were making it really hard for them to compete because everything is so cheap overseas. With mechanized labor, they’re able to produce these pre-inoculated blocks, put them on a seatrain,  ship them overseas, and then a mushroom grower here in the States can just put it into a fruiting room and grow the mushroom. Which is great, on some economic levels, I guess. But it’s super industrialized. Everything’s being done overseas, and all they’re doing here is growing the mushroom out. And they’re able to call it a USDA organic-certified product. You look at the research on what the US is producing domestically, and it’s tiny. Don’t quote me on this, but I think it’s around 3 ½ percent of mushrooms are grown in the United States. But who knows how much of that 3 ½ percent is truly domestically grown (versus just finished in the US).

VK: 

Where are the majority of these shipments coming from? 

CB: 

China, Australia, Canada… and then it’s being labeled as domestic. 

VK: 

So, what would change if AB1833 were to pass?

CB:  

It would ensure that pre-inoculated blocks imported from overseas and grown in California would not be able to list “CA grown” on the box. The product (mushrooms or olive oil) would have to be 100% derived from CA.

And I’m sure they’ll probably find a way to label it differently to skirt around any new regulations, but maybe the risk of having to pay a significant fine will deter them. 

The bill would also give consumers more transparency around where their food is coming from. Then, they can decide if they want to pay a little more to buy local, California-grown, or if they want to opt for a cheaper overseas version.

I’ve read a few articles about seatrains that were carrying mushroom blocks being seized. They tested some of these blocks, and found all kinds of things in them that are not good for human consumption. One of my friends who’s in Australia just paid to run some tests on a supplement he was taking, and it came back showing it had 460 times the legal limit of lead consumption. I’m not saying every business falls under that category. I’m sure there are reputable farms overseas, but if a label says a food was produced in the USA, then it should really mean that. 

So, we encourage people to buy US made. We need to keep the money in the States, instead of shipping it out. We have such good resources here.

We also encourage people to eat freshly grown mushrooms to optimize their health benefits. You’re always getting the fruiting body when you do that, versus wondering what your powdered coffee supplement is made with. What’s crazy is that people don’t really know that the supplement industry is all third-party regulated. And the people that do the testing actually work for the companies that are paying for the tests, so they are often biased. You don’t know how much Lions Mane or Cordyceps, or Chaga, or Reishi is in there. And because the US doesn’t produce much in the way of medicinal mushrooms, a lot of what goes into supplements is produced overseas.


VK: 

You mentioned that education is a big part of your mission. Can you tell us a little bit about the farm tours you offer for anyone interested in visiting next time they find themselves in Northern CA?

CB:

If you’re coming into the area, we do tours Monday through Friday, and we recommend people book in advance. It’s a great tour, from start to finish. We talk about how the mushrooms grow,  and how we pick and distribute them. We also share our backstory a little bit, and how we got started. The tours are really good for all ages. 

Also, our grow kits are a great educational tool. We’ve really been pumping them out nationwide, and they’ve been doing very, very well. They’re 100% American-grown, pesticide-free and organic. Although we’re not certified organic, we have been organic since day one. Everything that we do is organic on the way in and on the way out. 

VK: 

I just want to add that certified organic isn’t always all it’s cracked up to be. And there are many, many food producers that are doing above and beyond organic practices. They just can’t afford the certification. 

CB: 

OK, we’re going with you on that because we do everything above and beyond organic, for sure.

Also, if any of your readers are in the area and want to eat at some of the fine-dining restaurants or midrange restaurants up here, there’s a good chance that they will have our mushrooms on the menu.

VK: 

Amazing.

Thank you so much, Chris. We’re looking forward to a farm visit soon, and we’re super excited to follow your continued path of growth and success!

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