Westside Mushies founder Adam Bray is in a committed, long-term relationship with Adelaide’s inner west.
He grew up in Torrensville; went swimming at Henley Beach; kicked a footy for the Henley Sharks; and his parents owned the shop in Woodville Park that became Cam Wah, a neighbourhood Chinese-Vietnamese restaurant that, by our man’s reckoning, serves a banh mi to be reckoned with. As far as Bray is concerned: west side, as the late Tupac Shakur told us, is the best side. When it came time to pick a name for his urban mushroom-growing business, representing the neighbourhood was a no-brainer.
The Westside Mushies story began in June 2020 after Bray stumbled down a mushroom-growing Youtube wormhole. After poring over textbooks and online videos, he bought a home-growing kit and successfully cultivated some pink oysters in his bedroom. After identifying a market for locally grown mushrooms, Bray set about upscaling things and contacting growers around Australia, such as The Mushroom Guys in Perth, for advice. Eventually, his mushrooms found their way into the kitchens and menus of key Adelaide establishments such as Topiary, Bloom, Fino Vino and Udaberri.
It’s not hard to understand this rapid success. Westside Mushies was offering coral tooth, lion’s mane, pioppino, oyster and other lesser-seen mushroom varieties, and the ’shrooms were delivered within hours of being harvested and without styrofoam packaging – plus they tasted great. Additionally, mindful chefs appreciated the sustainability aspect of an urban farm operating 15 minutes from the city centre that turned “waste” products, such as sawdust, wheat bran and soybean hulls, into a fertile growing medium that could then be composted.
Things were going well, with weekly production landing somewhere between 60 and 70 kilos. Then Bray noticed the growing number of single-use plastic bags he was using and realised that his sustainable operation might not have been as sustainable as he’d have liked. (Commercially farmed mushrooms are grown by filling plastic bags with a growing medium inoculated with mushroom spores; the bags are then cut open to allow the mushroom to “fruit” before being harvested.) By his calculations, he used around 4000 bags in his first year. This year, he’d be on track to go through between 12,000 and 15,000 bags.
“That wasn’t going to cut it for me,” says Bray, who suddenly scaled back production in November last year. “I love doing the work, interacting with customers on Instagram and driving out and doing deliveries – it’s the best. But then, the day after delivery, I’d come back here and empty all the [grow] blocks into the compost and would be left with almost two wheelie bins squashed full of plastic. It was the one part of my week that I wasn't proud of.”
While business coaches might label the decision as financial suicide, Bray says hitting the brakes was necessary to reset and rethink how he did things. After further research and experiments, production ramped back up this year as Bray trialled a new system replacing single-use plastic bags with glass jars and plastic tubs that could be cleaned and reused. This development wasn’t just good news for SA chefs and eaters who could get their Westside Mushies fix again – chefs Kane Pollard (Topiary) and Jackson Bennett (Bloom), early supporters of Bray, were among the first to get mushrooms grown via this new system – it also resonated with people globally.
“Since I’ve been posting about [growing in glass and plastic jars] online, I’ve had messages from other small growers in France, in LA, in Ireland, in Spain,” says Bray. “They’ve seen what I’m doing and found it inspirational, and now they’re doing their own trials and posting pictures of jars on social media. It’s making a difference and causing people to think about things differently.”
Cracking the code of growing mushrooms minus single-use plastic isn’t the only highlight of 2022 for Bray: this year, he’ll welcome customers to Westside Mushies’ new growing facility in Royal Park. In addition to giving Bray more space to grow and the ability to start selling mushrooms to home cooks, this new facility will also allow customers to choose and buy harvested-to-order mushrooms. The space also includes a classroom for Bray to pass on his methods, as well as an “urban farmgate” – a one-stop-shop retailing products from chefs and friends of Westside. Those include recently appointed young chef ambassador Sarah Jones: an emerging cooking talent currently at the National Wine Centre who has done great things in the competition-cooking arena. In short, this new space gives Bray a powerful new pulpit – in addition to his lively Instagram account – to keep spreading the good word about this important urban crop.
“The fact that you can grow them in an urban environment makes mushrooms pretty sustainable; the only downside I had was the plastic bags,” says Bray. “But other than those, everything else was compostable. You could run things off solar panels, and growing mushrooms requires very little water. I really think mushrooms are the future. They’re going to be one of the ways that humans of the future will be smarter with their food.”
Westside Mushies’ new shop and urban farm is slated to open in autumn.
