Meet the urban farmer sprouting mushrooms from coffee waste in Portugal
“I wanted to find a way to reconcile economy and ecology, to take, to make, and then try to reuse that as much as possible. Waste that we can create more value out of is not wasted,” Natan says.
By Sharifah Fadhilah Alshahab & Michael Rupp
Euro News
28/08/2023
Excerpt:
In 2018, Natan founded Nam Mushroom, an urban farming project cultivating edible fungus. He quickly ramped up efforts to expand his business by contacting restaurants to sell mushrooms and coffee shops to collect coffee waste.
Before long, Natan landed a partnership with Portugal’s largest coffee distributor Delta Cafés. As part of their daily routine, they visit various locations across the city to refill and clean their coffee vending machines. They collect the coffee waste and hand it over to Nam Mushroom during this process.
“We work exclusively with these vending machines because they guarantee that the coffee waste is fresh and that no one touches it. So, the idea is to have the best raw material for our mushrooms,” says Pedro Castro, director of Delta Ventures, the company’s investment arm.
Nam Mushrooms receives 100 kilograms of coffee waste daily from Delta Cafés. Natan says converting this into mushrooms is an easy process on his farm.
“We do a little treatment. Then, we incubate the bags for two to three weeks inside the incubation room, where we mimic the conditions of nature,” Natan explains.
