“We are diversifying our range with giant mushrooms”

The mushroom season is back on track! After a quiet month of August, mushrooms are back on the French market. "Mushroom consumption always drops during the summer, by 20-30%. This year, July was a better month for mushroom sales because the weather was not very summery. But the return of the nice weather in August made trading more complicated for this product," explains Alexandre Picault, managing director of Kultive. "This week, with the start of the new school year, sales are finally picking up again! We are selling 40-45 tons of mushrooms a week, hoping to reach 55-60 tons a week and looking for clients to support our increased production."

This is the second year that the company has chosen to diversify into mushrooms. It is an exciting new venture, but it also brings with it its share of challenges. "We are constantly learning and evolving in line with the new information we receive. The new challenges we face allow us to perfect our skills so that we can meet our clients' expectations always more effectively. For example, to offset the drop in consumption of white mushrooms, we are developing new products such as giant mushrooms, for which there is a demand, as well as brown mushrooms. However, creating giant references means that we have to thin out the crops more quickly, and therefore generate smaller products. This is a size that is now more in demand in the processing sector than in the fresh sector, so it is up to us to create the demand. Similarly, brown mushrooms are 25-30% less productive than white ones, so it is important for our producers that we succeed in getting more out of them.

This second year has been marked by good growth in private label sales and by a project underway to make even greater use of the mushrooms grown by Kultive producers. "The mushroom is one of the products that will be audited this autumn to be included in our Demain La Terre certified vegetable range."