Meet the Mushroom Start-Up Supplying The General Tarleton
Living North catches up with the founders of Wild Spore Co, the new speciality mushroom growers
‘We’d wanted to work for ourselves and we always thought we could make a good crack at it. We just weren’t sure what we were going to do,’ explains Carly. ‘We’re both quite outdoorsy and we quite like the foraging side of things. Our weekends would mostly be up the trails, finding bits on the ground, and you get into mushrooms from that. Then that grows arms and legs and you start thinking about where they come from and how they grow.’
Wild Spore Co completely cultivate their own mushrooms, and the learning curve was undeniably steep, but worth it given what was otherwise available in supermarkets. ‘They’re sad, they’re soggy, they’re slimy, they’re imported, and they’ve been sitting in the back of a wagon for a week before they get to the customer. It’s a shame really because they’re such a great product,’ says Carly. For quality mushrooms, Carly tells us that a keen eye for detail is needed. ‘It’s a specific amount of light for a specific amount of time and a specific amount of fresh air coming in. There needs to be a specific amount of CO2 staying in before it leaves.’
Getting Wild Spore Co off the ground required a total overhaul in lifestyle for Carly and Ellie, who had been living in Leeds. Not scared of hard work, the pair took on a calving season in the Scottish Borders to save money, before putting down roots in Kirk Hammerton, just outside York. ‘It’s scary to put everything on the line,’ says Carly. ‘Having done all of the background research whilst we were on the farm, we came back and started buying all of our equipment. We really went in head first. We were treating the first three months of the company as a working trial. We were trying to grow as many high-quality mushrooms as we could, and seeing if there was a market to sell them.’
The local community was foundational in giving Wild Spore Co the support it needed. ‘The village hall has this community-run café run by a couple of women in the village. They are very keen for local suppliers to come along and sell. They have bread, fresh-cut flowers, and fruit and vegetables available for people that attend the café to come and purchase,’ Carly explains. ‘So we chatted with them, and they allowed us to come along for free, no stall fee or anything, and sell our little punnets of speciality mushrooms. We sold out every week – it was a big confidence boost.’
It was this community spirit which led to the most surprising turn for Wild Spore Co – rubbing shoulders with Michelin-starred chef Tommy Banks. ‘The very first punnet of mushrooms we sold was to the mother-in-law of one half of Jeopardy Hospitality.’ This is a recent venture from Tommy Banks and his collaborators, established to revive beloved gastropubs which have fallen on hard times. Their first project: The General Tarleton.
‘The chefs came over and liked what we were doing, so they’ve put us on their menu at The General Tarleton,’ explains Carly. ‘It’s such a huge confidence boost for us because we’re fairly social people but the idea of going up and saying “will you please buy my mushrooms?” to a restaurant is scary. To have a Michelin-star chef take a risk on you and recognise the quality behind it, that was really reassuring.’
Wild Spore Co’s main audience is still local markets, and Carly and Ellie hope to continue expanding in the future. ‘The confidence boost we’ve had, there’s absolutely no reason for us to pack it in now. Our focus is on growing – we’ve already gone through one stage of expansion. We started with a little one-by-one-metre tent. Now we’re growing in something six times that size. So it’s a steady financial climb to the next stage.’
Having poured so much of their time into the business already, cutting corners isn’t something the pair are interested in. ‘You could do this cheaply but I don’t believe you’d be able to do it very well or very consistently,’ Carly says. ‘We have an electric van which was a recent purchase and it has opened up our delivery radius which is brilliant. The van charges from solar and all of the electrical equipment involved in the mushroom growth is on solar so that’s really cool. It’s a nice full-circle process – you grow the mushrooms on what is essentially hardwood sawdust, and once that has given all it can, you put it back into the ground and compost it, and then you start again.’
Though still a small operation, the future is bright for Wild Spore Co. ‘As far as confidence in the product goes, we couldn’t have more and the customers seem to have confidence. Who would have thought mushrooms were that important to people?’
