Mycelium Bacon

Tim Hammerich
News Reporter
Lab grown meat has certainly not lived up to the hype from a few years ago. But there’s been another alternative protein that humans have been eating for generations: mushrooms. Co-founder and CEO of Ecovative, Eben Bayer says their product looks, tastes, and replicates pork bacon but is made up of 100% mycelium
Bayer... "Really, consumers want to have a delicious product that's not weird and made from a thousand ingredients and, you know, ultimately just like does the job of bacon or steak. Mushrooms are unique in that they're very animal flesh-like, like they're closer to animals than plants are. And in our process, we were finding a way to basically unlock particularly meaty mushrooms, those kind of oyster mushrooms I just mentioned that you'd find at a farmer's market. We can unlock that meat-like texture at an order of magnitude, lower economic costs, and an order of magnitude greater scale. And so it's sort of that intersection of that with like, hey, the market would really like an organic farm-to-table, whole-cut muscle meat that's not made from an animal. But at the same time, when we're doing super high tech, we're doing like high throughput screen straining. We're figuring out how to like use AI to tightly control the environmental conditions in these farms. And it is cellular manufacturing. These aerosolium cells grow micron layers at a time, like a giant 3D printer on the farm, and it produces these unbelievable textures. So it really is the fusion of like super sci-fi and conventional agriculture."
Ecovative and their partner company MyForest Foods produce a million pounds of mycelium bacon each year.