2 Billion Dollar Industry 🍄 ?

The global mushroom startup ecosystem is currently valued far in excess of the entire psychedelics industry, but no one is talking about it.

Even if we don’t include popular mushrooms produced explicitly for the food industry (ever heard of the Portobello Mafia? - and we don’t need to go into Button Mushrooms….) the global fungi industry is currently valued somewhere between 2.1 billion dollars and “USD 31809.22 million in 2021” which, to be honest, I have no idea how to read that number.

If we did include portobellos and button mushrooms, the industry would be closer to 55 billion US.

Any way you slice it, the current estimated value of the psychedelic industry is trending around 1 billion US if you count the valuation of publicly traded psychedelics companies. (source: Psychedelic Alpha), which is less than half of the current market size of the mushroom start-up ecosystem.

The overlap between mushrooms and psychedelics is pretty obvious from the vantage point of the mysterious and broadly accessible psilocybin mushroom, which is enjoying an unprecedented rate of consumption internationally. The size of the gray market (read: black market) is basically impossible to estimate currently, but a rudimentary survey of social media and the cultural landscape will tell you that millions upon millions of people are regularly consuming psilocybin mushrooms. One boutique hotel in Jamaica, one of only a handful of international jurisdictions where psilocybin-containing products are legally available for sale, is selling 4 gram psilocybin mushroom chocolate bars for $65 US apiece. On the gray market in the U.S., 2 gram psilocybin mushroom chocolate bars are more common and typically sell for $20 - $30 each.

Given that the cannabis black market was estimated to be in excess of $70 billion US in the United States alone as of 2019, and that many cannabis cultivators are invested in growing psilocybin mushrooms - and given that mushrooms require substantially less resources to grow than cannabis, the underground market for psilocybin mushrooms is surely in the tens of billions of dollars worldwide. How will any federal or international regulatory body possibly bring this under control?

But beyond “magic mushrooms”, the use cases for fungi technology have to be witnessed to be believed. Below is a current map of the fungi industry compiled by Marc Violo of MycoStories, a platform covering the global mushroom industry and start-up ecosystem.

On today’s Mycopreneur Podcast, we dive into the global mushroom industry with Marc Violo of MycoStories to gain cutting edge insights into the global mushroom industry start-up ecosystem and market size.

The numbers on market size and value across both the psychedelics industry and the mushroom industry vary wildly depending on who you ask and where the boundaries are drawn. For example, if you include Spravato Eskatamine by Johnson & Johnson in the psychedelics industry valuation, that might double the size of the industry.

Compass Pathways announced at the PSYCH Symposium in London this week that they anticipate legal access to their commercial psilocybin therapy by 2027. I value that many people will likely find this particular route of psilocybin access and administration highly effective and desirable, but one should also ask how many billions of dollars worth of unregulated psilocybin market value exists today in spite of prohibition and regulatory ignorance.

Speculations aside, the global mushroom industry is poised to take over the planet in a way that ‘ the psychedelic industry’ could never imagine. When we extend the applications of fungi to their full potential, we find that trillions of dollars worth of industry stand to be disrupted by fungi technology. From packaging, to structural insulated paneling in real estate, to fashion, to biofuels, to functional mushrooms for athletic performance, to plastic eating mushrooms and mushrooms that clean up oil spills, and a currently unknowable number of additional and prospective use cases, the limits of fungi technology are as vast and varied as the human imagination.

The resources depicted here in this newsletter were each created by Marc, and offer unparalleled insight into the global mushroom industry as it stands today in July 2023.

We go deeper into all of this on the podcast, so please consider diving in and sharing your thoughts with us after you give it a listen. While you’re at it, please consider leaving a review wherever you’re listening to the episode.

If you enjoyed this newsletter, please consider subscribing and referring a friend. I pledge to be consistent with this newsletter and hope to grow alongside you, dear reader, as we navigate the mainstreaming of the mushroom industry together.

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