Engineer couple builds Rs 15 crore business of exotic mushrooms; first to grow wild gucchi indoors

On the evening of March 24, 2020, the Government announced a nationwide lockdown as a preventive measure against the COVID-19 pandemic. At that time, trucks loaded with three tonnes (3,000 kg) of button mushrooms were set to leave the farm of Poonam Sharma and Naveen Patwal in Pauri Garhwal, Uttarakhand, for the Azadpur Mandi in Delhi.

Naveen had set up the hi-tech button mushroom farm in 2007 with a bank loan of Rs 1.35 crore and fully repaid it by 2012. He also expanded the initial daily capacity from 800 kg to 3 tonnes by 2016. 

“The daily button mushroom production of 3 tonnes at our Faldakot unit was supplied to the Azadpur Mandi. The lockdown led to massive wastage as we neither had any processing facility nor any other buyer,” Naveen tells 30Stades.

Poonam and Naveen, both engineers, suffered a Rs 2-crore loss when mushrooms were thrown away in fields due to a lack of cold storage facilities. 

“The pandemic taught us two things – one, we could not rely on a single buyer or commission agents and two, we could not rely on a single product (button mushroom which has a shelf life of only three days),” says Naveen, who completed his B.Tech in Computer Science in 2003. 

His wife Poonam is an engineer from IIT Kharagpur and worked in the development bank SIDBI before she quit in 2013 to join Naveen’s mushroom business.

Also Read: From unsold packets to Rs 5.5 lakh monthly revenue, how this man built a mushroom business

Learning diversification from the first mistake

After learning from the pandemic, the couple decided to expand to exotic mushrooms like shiitake, king oysters, lion’s mane, reishi, cordyceps, and chanterelles and launched their brand Planet Mushroom in 2020. 

Exotic mushrooms are more flavorful and have unique textures, aromas, and nutritional properties. The fresh ones sell at Rs1000 to Rs1200 per kg while the dried exotic mushrooms fetch Rs 8,000 in wholesale and Rs12,000 in the retail market.

“In 2022, we started with shiitake mushroom in a 100 sq mt room in our unit after procuring the mother culture from a research institute,” says Poonam.

The mother culture is a pure culture of mushroom mycelium. It is grown on a sterile medium and then used to inoculate a substrate like sterilized paddy straw, resulting in spawn (mushroom seed). “Since our facility already had a mushroom lab and other infrastructure, it was easy for us to grow other varieties,” Poonam adds.

Naveen procured mother cultures of other mushrooms like cordyceps, king oyster, reishi, and lion’s mane and began cultivating them in the unit. 

“The mother culture for any mushroom variety can also be retrieved from mushrooms in the market where a cross-section of the mushroom is cut to get the fungus,” Naveen explains.

Also Read: Homemaker grows cordyceps mushroom in 200 sq ft room; earns Rs30 lakh annually

Learning marketing from the second mistake

The first harvest of shiitake mushrooms was 20kg, and Naveen took it to a shop in Delhi’s INA Market, famous for its fresh fruits and vegetables. The shopkeeper asked him to sell it at Rs300 per kg while the wholesale price was Rs1200 per kg. 

“On asking about the extremely low rate for my shiitake mushrooms, the shopkeeper said I won’t find any other buyer in INA. I returned without selling because the rate did not cover my production cost. I distributed it among family and friends,” Naveen recollects.

This incident taught him another lesson– it is a good strategy to directly connect with customers to weed out middlemen and ensure reasonable rates for producers and buyers. 

Also Read: From Rs 2000 investment to Rs 35 lakh annual turnover, how this man built a mushroom business in Odisha

“Two months later, we set up our retail outlet in INA Market, built our website, created a marketing team and began reaching out to people on social media,” he says.

“We aim to turn exotic mushrooms into mass mushrooms so everyone can purchase them. This is possible only by increasing scale and popularizing the health benefits of exotic mushrooms,” Poonam says.

Today, their unit's daily production is 100 kgs of every exotic mushroom variety and 3.5 tonnes of button mushrooms. They are sold in retail and wholesale, clocking a turnover of Rs 15 crore annually. 

The biggest achievement – growing wild gucchi in a polyhouse

Yet, the couple’s biggest achievement is not growing exotic mushrooms in a rural area of Uttarakhand. It is perfecting the farming of wild mushrooms gucchi in a polyhouse.

“I had grown up seeing everyone in my village foraging gucchi from the native forests in Faldakot and selling it to middlemen. I was aware of its rarity and market value,” says Naveen. 

In 2022, he started his experiments with gucchi or morel mushrooms by collecting various strains, making spawns, and studying global research. He referred to the Directorate of Mushroom Research (Solan) for trial in 2021, resulting in 4 kg of fresh gucchi. However, it could not be replicated on a large scale. 

“In December 2024, I rented a 100 sq mt abandoned polyhouse in my native village for trial cultivation. At 1600 m above sea level, I put the spawns on December 28 and the pinheads or primordial began appearing by March 5,” he says.

The gucchi mushrooms were ready for harvest on March 18. “We harvested around 100 kg of gucchi mushrooms from 100 sq mt. It is sold after drying, which reduces the weight to one-eighth (about 13 kg),” Naveen says. The market price for dried gucchi ranges between Rs30,000 and Rs40,000 per kg. 

“This is the first successful commercial-scale trial of gucchi mushrooms in Uttarakhand. It shows that controlled environment gucchi cultivation is possible with minimal water use. It can transform rural economies and put Uttarakhand on the global map of mushroom farming,” Naveen says. 

(Rashmi Pratap is a Mumbai-based journalist specialising in financial, business and socio-economic reporting)

Also Read: With Rs150 investment, how this housewife built a mushroom business earning Rs3 lakh monthly

Look up our YouTube Channel