M2 Ingredients completes expansion of mushroom cultivation and processing facility

Cultivated lion's mane. Photo © AdobeStock.com/contentdealer

M2 Ingredients (Vista, CA) has announced the completion of a facility expansion, growing to 155,000 square feet of organic mushroom cultivation and processing. The facility doubled the company’s 2023 capacity, is certified organic, and boasts a BRCGS AA-rating. According to the company, there are also plans to triple capacity by 2025.

Sandra Carter, the company’s found and CEO explained to Nutritional Outlook at Natural Products Expo West 2024 that the facility was built in a modular fashion that allows the company to increase production where necessary. “We have equipment at the very beginning stages, [such as] a big autoclave, and at the end, dehydration and milling, and we can add on more growing rooms as the demand dictates and stay under this one roof,” said Carter. The company grows ten species of mushrooms in-house, with grow rooms dedicated to individual species.

“We have developed individual rooms, so each species can have the best environmental conditions to not only optimize the bioactive compounds, but to keep that environment consistent,” explained Carter. “Bioactivity can vary in plants and mushrooms depending on the environmental conditions, so one of the unique things is, we’re able to control that and keep it consistent.”

The expansion also allows M2 to conduct R&D for the development of new strains, intellectual property, differentiated solutions, and functional blends. “We have IP on our strains, and we do a lot breeding programs for each of the species looking for specific genetics that may either increase productivity, increase the amount of fruiting body, or the amount of bioactive compounds in in the product,” explained Julie Daoust, chief scientific officer for M2 Ingredients. “So, our team of mycologists are always optimizing our genetics and that's something that we keep in house. It's actually kind of rare [because] a lot of growers buy their spawn, their planting material, and don’t own their genetics, and we actually have the chance to have a team of mycologists that can really help differentiate our products through the strains that we use.”

M2 says that its master cultures are cryogenically stored “to ensure vigor and purity,” and the strains undergo identity testing through DNA sequencing and verification.