Hello out there in listener land, this is Romy bringing you another episode of the Bonfires of Social Enterprise. This episode is all about mushrooms! Did you know there are all different types of mushrooms that can be grown indoors, and, that there is a mushroom factory in Detroit? Well, you will meet Deana and Chris and hear all about their story from concept to now. As customary, I also like to introduce a song from a Detroit artist at the end of each episode so stay tuned to the end.

Okay, let’s see what Luke has for our fun fuel today…..

Hi, this is Luke Trombley, and I am bringing you the fun fuel for this episode.

Did you know that there are over 30 species of mushrooms that glow in the dark? The chemical reaction involved in this is called bioluminescence which produces a glowing light known as foxfire. Some people will use this fungi to light paths through the woods.

Thank you for listening to this fun fuel. Enjoy the episode!

Very nice Luke. Glowing in the dark….what a fungi….ha ha. Okay, Romy, enough with the bad jokes. Let’s listen in to what Deanna and Chris are up to and how this all began.

Romy:

Okay, great. Well, welcome Deana and Chris to the podcast, Bonfires of Social Enterprise. Got your cool business here. Let's talk about the Detroit Mushroom Factory.

Deana:

Great. Well thanks for having us. To just give a little background, we are a mushroom farm. We grow right now just out of our home. We live in Detroit, and we grow mushrooms in the basement.

We grow on a substrate that comprises spent brewery grain that we get donated to us from a brewery in Detroit called Detroit Beer Company, and we mix that with sawdust that we get donated to us from a local woodworker named Richard Ganas. And so those two things we combine, we add mushroom spawn, and then we grow those mushrooms and sell them, mostly to local restaurants.

Romy:

Wow. Let's go over that one more time just in case, just for terminology. So you grow the mushrooms in your basement on, what was that? It was a bent ... Say that again.

Deana:

Spent brewery grain. So when beer is brewed at a brewery, they are left over with all this grain that comes out of the mash tun and that's usually a waste stream [inaudible 00:01:26 ].

So our model, one of the aims of our business is to be a totally sustainable farm. And so we have committed to only growing on recycled materials and spent brewery grain is one of those materials.

Romy:

Okay. Brewery grain, just for those listening in other languages. Okay.

Deana:

Oh yeah.

Romy:

And then the sawdust. Okay. Wow, that's amazing. Do you need a lot of room for that in your basement?

Deana:

Well, we don't have it.

Chris:

I was just going to say; we have one of these old houses in Detroit. It's a four bedroom house, and it's just Deana, myself and our dog, so we really have three bedrooms and a basement and part of a backyard dedicated just to the mushrooms.

So it does take quite a bit of space, I would say. It takes quite a bit of equipment, and it's a little more complicated on the front end than maybe your traditional farming or your gardening because it requires equipment.

For instance, we take that [inaudible 00:02:34 ], which is usually barley, from the brewery, mix it with the sawdust and the