Make Room for Mushrooms

Steve Melito: Hey everybody, welcome to New York State Manufacturing Now, the podcast that’s powered by FuzeHub. I’m your host, Steve Melito. Today we’re talking to Sam Newman-Plotnick, cooperative Partner at Flowering Sun Ecology Center in Ellenville, New York. Flowering Sun is a community-run project that cultivates and provides organic gourmet mushrooms using sustainable agricultural practices, and they’re also one of our 2025 Round 2 awardees for FuzeHub’s Manufacturing Grants. Sam, congratulations and welcome to New York State Manufacturing Now.Sam Newman-Plotnick: Thank you Steve for having us.

Steve Melito: It’s great to have you here, so let’s start at the very beginning. How did you become interested in mushrooms and what’s your background like, and does it all fit together somehow?

Sam Newman-Plotnick: Yeah, so I was raised in the suburbs of Albany and my family they’re mainly academics. Learning was always deeply valued and kind of an obsession and I think the love of curiosity just always stuck with me. I’ve always been passionate about systems that support people in the planet. I went to Cornell and I studied industrial and labor relations. So I really focused on understanding how to build fair and equitable workplaces. So collective bargaining, arbitration, those kinds of things really implementing healthy dynamics between management and employees always resonated with me as an important thing in business. So I think that background academically really shaped how I think about cooperation and system change in a whole. My interest in mushrooms came a bit after that, but once I started learning about them I felt pretty hooked. A bit after that, but once I started learning about them I felt pretty hooked. So you know I think that mushrooms have always been ahead of their time or really were probably just late to the party. They’ve been around in human culture for thousands of years. They’ve been used in everything from medicine to food to even spiritual practice. But only recently have I begun to really understand the full potential of mushrooms. They can regenerate soil, they can connect ecosystems, they can even inspire sustainable technologies and materials like product packaging. This seemed really transformative and I just you know I really wanted to be a part of that. I feel deeply that mushrooms are a truly revolutionary new energy in the world, and so bringing all these threads together equity, ecology, my love of food and wanting to innovate something special propelled me forward, and then Flowering Sun kind of kicked into gear.

Steve Melito: That’s excellent. Mushrooms are cool, so are mushrooms the same as mycelium, or are they different?

Sam Newman-Plotnick: Mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of mycelium. So you think about mycelium as the body and the mushroom is the fruit. So essentially underground you have these intelligent fungal threaded networks that are called hyphae and they recycle nutrients, they connect plant life. You can think of it like a natural internet. Actually, scientists refer to the mycelium under the ground is the wood wide web.

Steve Melito: I love it.

Sam Newman-Plotnick: Yeah, so they’re super vital to ecosystems. And the mushrooms is just the final iteration of the whole process, when you grow them and then you bear the fruit.

Steve Melito: So, did I hear you correctly, you mentioned the word intelligent. Do they communicate somehow underground, through chemical signals or something like that?

Sam Newman-Plotnick: Yeah, they recycle nutrients and they connect all the different trees essentially underneath the ground, and so a lot of the communication that happens between plant life in the forest goes through the mycelial fungal networks.

Steve Melito: Excellent. So they play a critical role in the ecosystem overall. Are mushrooms plants or are they a fungus, or are they their own category? I’ve read recently some people say yeah, they should be their own form of life.

Sam Newman-Plotnick: They’re part of the fungal kingdom. So they’re pretty similar to humans in that they breathe in oxygen, they let out CO2, but they’re in their own kingdom. So they’re pretty similar to humans in that they breathe in oxygen, they let out CO2, but they’re in their own kingdom. For sure they’re distinct from plants.

Steve Melito: They’re distinct from plants, very good. So let’s change gears a little bit and talk about Flowering Sun Ecology Center. It sounds to me like it’s more than just a business. Can you tell us about it, some of the vision behind it?

Sam Newman-Plotnick: Yeah, we see Flowering Sun as a farming community, really, above all, a handful of people that are deeply committed to regenerative practices and disseminating and educating that to the local food economy and beyond. So we have a long-term vision to create a cooperative network with the neighboring farms in the local region and really creating a network, a local food system with year-round organically grown food storage crops and really increasing the food supply. We want to get into education. We’re already getting into education, but we want to get more into education and create an actual educational hub that really trains the next generation of farmers and empowers people to live in closer relationship with earth and the elements. So we see that as cleaner tech and more responsible resource practices emerge, we see opportunities to really develop cooperative, non-extractive systems that work with the natural ecosystem rather than against them. They’re not mutually exclusive. So, combining forward thinking, manufacturing and design and a cooperative network where we work with neighboring farms, even if we are distinct businesses, this is going to benefit everyone and if there’s one investment in the future, that is for sure and most people can agree on in the future, that is for sure.

Steve Melito: And most people can agree on. I would say that’s good food and community Absolutely. And you’re located in Ellenville, which is in the lower Hudson Valley, is that correct?

Sam Newman-Plotnick: Yeah, we’re about an hour south of Woodstock in Kingston.

Steve Melito: Okay, and so there are lots of local farms there.

Sam Newman-Plotnick: Yeah, it’s definitely a burgeoning area for regenerative, biodynamic permaculture, all that good stuff. There are a lot of people here doing some pretty cool things.

Steve Melito: Good and you’re growing mushrooms. What types do you grow and why did you choose them?

Sam Newman-Plotnick: So we grow blue oyster, golden oyster, lion’s mane, coral tooth and we sometimes grow enoki mushrooms and when we cycle, what we add and each week usually varies, but for the most part the oysters, the lion’s mane and the coral tooth are in consistent supply, we do fresh harvests. We have a whole system where we make our blocks. We put the substrate into this computerized bagger machine. Essentially, we make our blocks, we sterilize them. So the purpose of sterilization is to kill any competing microorganisms so that when you actually put the mycelium spawn in there’s a clean growing environment. So you inoculate the spawn, you let them colonize in the racks for a few weeks, then you put them into the grow rooms and this is a very precise janitorial job Lots of cleaning and maintenance, making sure the airflow is good and making sure the CO2 levels are good, making sure the humidity is at the right percentage. So we’ve really had to dial this in over the years. In the beginning we dealt with a lot of contamination. If one thing goes wrong, things spread and the whole operation has to essentially start over. So we’ve had a lot of trial and tribulation but we’ve been dialing the code in and it feels like a good time.

Steve Melito: So tell me more about these blocks. Are they made out of wood?

Sam Newman-Plotnick: They’re made out of soy hulls and sawdust, about 50-50. And that’s it, very simple.

Steve Melito: Okay, and when you inoculate the spores, do you have to drill a hole or make a hole and put the spore inside the hole, just like a seed in the ground?

Sam Newman-Plotnick: We have essentially a sealer, a sealer machine, so we open the bag and put the mycelium in and then we seal it up and then, when we’re ready to fruit them, we cut the bags and the whole process is about one to two weeks once it’s in the fruiting chambers. Give or take, and for the most part the varieties that we work with all grow really well together. So some varieties don’t work with other varieties, but the ones we work with all can be grown together in the same space. And we have plans to scale up and invest into some facilities and grow our existing facilities. Right now we have a couple grow rooms, so we’re maxed out of production. We’re a little above a thousand pounds a week, which is a pretty good amount, but we are going to go from there.

Steve Melito: Okay, excellent. And did you say one to two weeks to grow the mushrooms? Is it that quickly?

Sam Newman-Plotnick: The whole process takes about five to seven weeks, but once they’re in the grow rooms it’s about one to two weeks. So you have to include the inoculation and the colonization period before and sterilization and making the bags. Some varieties, like reishi, can take as long as three or four months, so it really depends. Reishi is a new mushroom variety that we’re introducing. It’s a medicinal mushroom, so things are always ebbing and flowing and we’re always trying new things and experimenting.

Steve Melito: That’s good, and you and I have talked before and I grow shiitakes on logs and I remember when I first started I thought, well, I can just take some logs off of the ground in the forest, and that’s not the case, because you need to have the right kind of mushroom in there, not the other kinds that you don’t want.

Sam Newman-Plotnick: Yeah, like I said, it’s a janitorial process, so you just have to get used to that and be okay doing the deep cleaning and the deep bleaching. It’s a very humbling process.

Steve Melito: Yeah, sure, sure. So we talked a little bit about how you grow your mushrooms and now I understand how you can do this during our long upstate New York winters. Does the weather ever become a factor outside to what you do inside?

Sam Newman-Plotnick: No, all our facilities are insulated. Our lab is indoors, we have the sterilizer indoors and our grow rooms are in our greenhouse within a separate construction unit. So everything is shielded from the elements.

Steve Melito: Okay good. So let’s talk about your customers a little bit. So if I go to your website, I see you’ve got retailers, you’ve got distributors, you’ve got restaurants. What’s your business model like? I mean, do you sell directly to consumers as well, or is it mostly B2B?

Sam Newman-Plotnick: Right now. In the last five plus years has been a focus on B2B, so we primarily sell to small distributors. We sell to supermarkets mainly health food oriented markets. We sell to tons of restaurants spanning New York City, the Catskills, we sell in Albany, we even sell in the Berkshires now we sell in New Paltz and Kingston and I’m sure there’s some other areas I’m forgetting. But we have a plan to launch an e-commerce operation very soon, in a couple months, so we’ll be sending out fresh mushroom chef mix boxes that will comprise three to four varieties and you can pick and choose, and so right now we’re just working on the logistics and how to ship them. So by the time they get to the customer they’re really fresh.

Steve Melito: Excellent. So, besides eating mushrooms, what can you do with them? In other words, can they be turned into useful products? You had mentioned packaging earlier, but are there other things that you can do?

Sam Newman-Plotnick: This is the part of the conversation that I’ve been most looking forward to and what I think has the most value going forward and also requires the most education for the customers out there. There’s so many mushroom supplements. The market’s pretty saturated, people think, but there are so many different types of products that you can use. Also, depending on the extraction level processes, you can make products very potent. So there’s a lot of therapeutic value in many of these mushrooms. Lion’s Mane has neurologic factors that can help with synapse connectivity and brain health. Reishi mushroom has all kinds of immune boosting properties. Maitake can purportedly help with anti-tumor, anti-cancerous properties and actually high dose Maitake extracts are being experimented on cancer patients. Right now you also have cordyceps. That is very good for physical endurance and longevity. There’s been some studies actually that show that it can help with oxygen utilization. A lot of high-level athletes take Cordyceps extract and that helps them kind of get that 10% more of a kick.

So right now we’re interested in ultrasonic technology. In essence, we are using high-frequency sound waves to rupture these very dense molecular structures inside the cell walls of mushrooms. These structures are called chitin, c-h-i-t-i-n and by and large this is where most of the bioactives are located the triterpenes, polysaccharides, beta-glucans all the compounds of interest that deliver the therapeutic impact from a number of these mushrooms that you really want. This technology is low thermal. It’s a green technology. You can use healthy solvents. You don’t need to use harsh chemicals. The extraction and efficiency is speeded up. It increases shelf life because it is leveraging nanoscience, so the particles are much smaller. I could go on and on, but essentially you’re targeting very localized forces into the cell walls, so your body is able to absorb only what it needs and nothing more. So many of the products in the market are blended or they go through maybe a single extraction process, but there are techniques out there that can get it to the next level and really deliver the therapeutic impact that consumer would want. So there are a lot of different kinds of products. There’s skincare. This is actually what we’re most looking forward to. We just launched a body butter, so this is a full body moisturizer, it’s a facial oil, it’s even a hair pomade, and so we use a number of botanical extracts, many of which can go through this process, and we use certain mushroom extractions and really increase the bioavailability. You can also get into pet products. You can get into straight up extracts, functional foods, supplements. The list goes on and on.

Steve Melito: Sure, so let’s talk about the supplements a little bit. My understanding is mushrooms are high in protein. Is that true? And then how does that compare to, say, the protein that’s available in meat or beans or some other source of food?

Sam Newman-Plotnick: So I’m a vegetarian myself. I think that a lot of vegetarians can become deficient in B vitamins because oftentimes there’s a lack of non-meat alternatives that can deliver the same protein, amino acid content. Mushroom fills in this gap very nicely. Actually, mushrooms, especially these gourmet mushrooms, especially these gourmet mushrooms have a full spectrum amino acid profile and they have really high protein and low calorie. So I would say it’s a superfood and you can texture them to mimic meat, you can bread them in panko and you can pan fry and you can put them on the grill, you can broil, you can bake. There’s so many amazing recipes out there, but I eat mushrooms a few times a week. I haven’t gotten tired of them just yet.

Steve Melito: They’re pretty amazing. So, listen, I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask about psilocybin containing mushrooms for medicinal purposes. What are your thoughts on that?

Sam Newman-Plotnick: Look, there’s so much social and cultural baggage associated with these compounds. But when you really look into the history of them and the therapeutic benefits and all the different studies that have already been underway through MAPS, you know, with NYU and Johns Hopkins it’s clear that these mushrooms have value. Depends on the set and setting like with anything, but there’s a lot of really good evidence that shows that it can really help rewire things in the brain and the nervous system. It can allow you to soften your prefrontal cortex, which is really the egoic part in charge that creates all these stories of the past, present and future. I think we still have a lot to learn from them, but it’s clear that psilocybin has been around for thousands of years. Many different cultural traditions have used it for a variety of reasons and I think that the future is really exciting and I think we should really look into it.

Steve Melito: Excellent, so you told us a little bit about some areas that you’d like to go into in terms of mushroom-based products. What’s your vision overall for Flowering Sun Ecology Center? Where do you see it in the next five to 10 years?

Sam Newman-Plotnick: Like I mentioned, I see that we want to really expand into education. We want to be educators, we want to teach people about regenerative biodynamic techniques. We want to serve as an example of how to work cooperatively. So I think there’s this illusion in the business world that to win, the other party has to lose. But when you pool your money, your resources and your decision-making power together in a way that is equal, there’s more success that can come from that. So I think it’s clear that co-ops that function and are governed well which is not always the easiest thing, but I think it’s something to strive for. Cooperative models that really value not just the business and the owners, but all the members I think can result in something really meaningful where we’re not just focused on mere profits but we’re focused on building a movement that’s endorsing a new way of living, a new way of eating, a new way of growing food, green technology, and these products are going to be really huge. We’re very, very grateful for this grant because it allows us to use some cash flow to really get started. We’ve been so focused on building up our fresh mushroom supply of the business, but when you start getting into products and you start adding value and getting more out of your raw materials, not to mention the B-grade mushrooms, the spent mushrooms that you can’t use. You can use all these raw materials and get so much more out of them, so there’s so many functional products.

Steve Melito: That’s excellent and that’s a great way to sort of ask. My last question is how can people buy your products? What’s your website and is it set up so they can go and order today if they wanted to?

Sam Newman-Plotnick: Yeah, we have our e-commerce CSA box operation starting in the summer. You can find that at floweringsun.org and you can find anything out about us through there. We also have an Instagram at floweringsun.org. We also started up a cosmetic product line. We’re really excited about this. We literally just kicked off our first product at the Empire State Expo at SUNY Cobleskill on May 2nd. So for the moment, we have a very simple landing page just to acquire some email signups, and that is truthmadeinnature.com. Two N’s truthmadeinnature.com Check us out, reach out. We’re happy to connect and we’re looking forward to the future.

Steve Melito: Awesome, Sam. Thanks so much for being on New York State Manufacturing Now.

Sam Newman-Plotnick: Thank you, Steve, it was a pleasure.

Steve Melito: We’ve been talking to Sam Newman-Plotnick, a cooperative partner at Flowering Sun Ecology Center in Ellenville, New York. Hey, if you’re interested in food and agriculture, let’s keep the conversation going. I’m inviting you to meet me in Herkimer, New York, for Vitality in the Valley. It’s where companies in the food, beverage and agriculture ecosystem connect. Vitality in the Valley begins with a reception for exhibitors on Tuesday June 3rd and is followed by the main event on Wednesday June 4th. There’s a trade show type aspect to it and this year’s keynote speaker is New York Secretary of Agriculture and Markets, Richard Ball. Whether you choose to join us as an exhibitor or an attendee, you’ll make some great connections at Vitality in the Valley. To register, go to FuzeHub.com, slash VIV2025. And if you didn’t get that, don’t worry, just email [email protected] and we’ll get you connected. So, on behalf of FuzeHub and New York State Manufacturing Now, this is Steve Melito signing off.