Manufacturing Innovation: MyForest Foods’ Alternative Approach to Food Production

Though AirMycelium is a novel technology—and MyForest Foods is doing a lot of things that have not been done for traditional food production—the mycelium company is working as much as possible to standardize processes and use standard equipment from other industries, particularly the mushroom industry, where Adam Heinze, MyForest’s director of operations, comes from.

At the R&D stage, MyForest started with smaller growth chambers. “They looked a lot like a standard walk-in refrigerator that you’d see at a restaurant—mostly because they were. Then we decided to get a little fancier,” Heinze says, explaining the company’s move to industrial cooling—though in a similar-sized box—to better control temperature and other environmental parameters. “And then the founders, Gavin and Eben, decided that it would be appropriate to see if we didn’t have to argue and bicker with fermenters, but if we could use off-the-shelf mushroom technology. So we built sort of half a traditional mushroom room.”

This was an R&D platform to help the founders figure out if off-the-shelf mushroom equipment—conveyors, hoppers, etc.—would work for their operations. “A lot of what we’re doing is taking conventional equipment from the mushroom industry and conventional processes from other industries like continuous steam sterilization of solid particles, conveyance of woodchips, and then combining them with unique biology,” Bayer says.

What Heinze describes as “the least interesting thing we do” are essentially mushroom works. For example, MyForest is using standard mushroom head filling equipment—a conveyor system typically used to fill mushroom shelves with compost and casing—to fill the shelves of its vertical farm with mycelium growth material. “The big conveyor pulls up to the front of the shelf, this conveyor rolls out, and that big guy in the back pulls the net at the same speed that that conveyor works,” Heinze says, explaining how the growth mixture populates the shelves in the vertical farm. “I can fill one of these shelves in about four minutes.”

Essentially, Heinze says, MyForest is growing mushrooms in a novel way. “The way we’re able to utilize equipment is that we’re basically just offering different sets of growth conditions to an existing product,” he says. “We are developing a different product, so we’re attempting to domesticate a new product in a shorter period of time.”

On the downstream end of this, however, the operation looks significantly different than a mushroom farm. Unlike the mushrooms, which get picked, the mycelium emerges as a giant slab that then goes to a slicer.

“We’re growing a texture,” Heinze emphasizes. “So then I don’t have to grind everything up, and emulsify it, and add thickeners. We’ve got a texture.”

The operation

Two green silos store the woodchip mixture that is used as the ‘soil’ to grow mycelium.Michael CostaMyForest Foods is vertically integrated—from woodchips to bacon. At one end of the operation are the two green silos (Swersey Silos) that are iconic at MyForest Foods. They contain the feedstocks—woodchips, typically, but could be another low-cost agricultural byproduct—that will be used to grow the mycelium. “One of the benefits of this process is that we literally use the lowest-grade carbon source you can imagine,” Bayer says. “Most bioprocesses use sugar—high value sugar. We’re using the same woodchips you’d burn in a burner.”

From the silos, the wet woodchip slurry makes its way into the pre-processing plant, where it’s heated, moisturized, and cooled, and then mycelium cells are inoculated into the mix. The woodchips are heated for sterilization and then cooled again to create the right environment for the mycelia to grow. “In the mushroom industry, I believe this is the largest continuous flow sterilizer that there is,” Bayer says.

From there, the mixture is put into several small bags. “You’ve got inoculated, sterilized, cooled woodchips that have been expanded and filled with the mycelium cells of our choice,” Bayer explains. The bags of growth material are sent down a conveyor and over to a palletizing operation, where robots pick them up and place them into baskets stacked on pallets, where they stay to grow.

“When the mycelium grows, it eats the woodchips—it’s like a biological fire,” Bayer explains. “It gives off CO₂, it’s burning the woodchips, it starts to get warmer, and it starts converting those woodchips and the protein and the other carbohydrates in there into this mycelial biomass, which becomes the network in the programming that will then become the finished product.”

The robots place the bags into the baskets in such a way that allows the bags room to breathe and to dissipate heat, Bayer adds. “It’s almost like a nuclear pile,” he says. “If you stack them too close together, they actually get so hot they’ll die, or in some cases you make a fire.”

This is essentially a solid-state fermentation process. “Most fermentation occurs in liquid, anaerobically, and this is aerobic,” Bayer says. “Like you, it breathes in air and respirates CO₂.”

Bags of the woodchip growth medium inoculated with mycelium cells sit in baskets on pallets to grow before being moved to the vertical farm.Michael Costa

The bags sit in the baskets for three or four days, giving off heat and growing and colonizing. “The bags basically turn white with mycelium,” Bayer says. “Then they get put into the grow room as soil.” Essentially, a full pallet fills the grow room, Heinze adds.

Ability to scale

“This input material thing is a missing enabling factor in the industry,” Bayer says. “What does it take to make this new mycelia tissue at scale at the appropriate price? It’s not some breakthrough in the lab, it’s absolute physical scale, and that includes the input material.”

To that end, MyForest Foods is doing everything it can to figure out how to make more of everything it’s producing. “This plant now produces at max capacity—something like 10 times what the North American current production infrastructure is—and it’s the largest in the world of its type,” Bayer says. “So this is an enabling piece of infrastructure that will enable other farms like MyForest Foods to grow the same crops.”

With Swersey Silos operating at full capacity, MyForest Foods is projected to serve MyBacon to more than 1 million consumers by 2024. The company aims to scale production over the next 18 months to full volume, Bayer says, focusing on further scaling up through a network of other producers. “Ultimately, we will grow the next circle out from this through working with other farmers and processors. We’re bringing all the unique pieces together to prove that this is possible. And then the next cycle is: How do you scale this as fast as possible in our manufacturing ecosystem,” he says. “We’re unique in that we built something that’s really amazing. Our goal now is to take this and push it into an ecosystem that exists.”

The economics are very good for the solid-state fermentation process that MyForest uses, according to Bayer. “Mushroom farming is farming—an order of magnitude lower cost than liquid fermentation in terms of capital efficiency,” he says. “If you look at this larger, broader landscape that we’re part of, whether it’s food or leather or anything, most people are trying to do stuff in big steel tanks—like whiskey or beer—and that actually doesn’t scale very well outside of anything in food."

The best way to scale to the levels that MyForest ultimately wants is through co-manufacturers, Bayer emphasizes, noting that the company has proven out its initial concept of integrated manufacturing sufficiently that it can begin to use co-mans. “So we’re moving to more of a pre-processing step where we’re doing basically a pasteurization step at the end to set the ingredients,” he says. “Then we can either take that to one of our two processing locations or to a co-man.”