Our farm
Grown, not bought
Flevoland, the Netherlands.
- We make our own substrate
- Used substrate returned to local farms
- Solar and wind
Land that was sea eighty years ago
Our farm is in Flevoland, the youngest province in the Netherlands - land reclaimed from the sea and turned into one of the most fertile agricultural regions in Europe. Mineral-rich soil, clean air, and an entire province built by people who farm.
That matters more than it sounds. Everything we need is within a short drive, because everyone around us is producing something we can use, and we are producing something they can use.
We make our own substrate. Almost nobody does.
Substrate is what a mushroom grows in - and it decides most of what the mushroom becomes. Get it wrong and no amount of care later will fix it.
Ours is made on the farm, from what the region already has. Sawdust and wood chips from nearby forests. Grain husks. Leftover yeast from breweries down the road. Egg shells from the chicken farm next door. All of it would otherwise be waste, or sold for almost nothing.
That is not a sustainability gesture, it is how farming has always worked here. We take what our neighbours cannot use, and they take what we cannot - our used substrate goes back onto their fields. Nobody is being charitable. It is simply what you do when everyone around you is a farmer.
Then we mix it: minerals, the right blend for the species, adjusted through the year as what is available changes. A batch grown in spring is not made of the same thing as one grown in autumn, because the region is not producing the same things.
Most mushroom farms do none of this. They buy substrate from large factories - uniform by design, made months in advance, identical whether it is going to Lion's Mane or Reishi. It is cheaper and it is far easier. It also means the single most important input in the whole process is decided by somebody else, for somebody else's reasons.
Substrate to pouch, one set of hands
We make the substrate, grow the mushroom, harvest it and extract it. Every stage, on one site, by one team.
That is rare. The normal arrangement in this industry is a chain of suppliers: one company makes the substrate, another grows, a third extracts, a fourth encapsulates, and a brand puts its name on the end of it. Each handover is a point where something can change without anyone downstream being told - a substrate reformulated for cost, a crop swapped for a cheaper origin, an extraction run hotter to clear a backlog.
None of those changes are visible in the finished powder. They are all visible in what it does.
Owning the chain is what lets us say the specific things on this page and on the Kanzen page at all. The temperature, the timing, the fruiting body, the absence of fillers - every one of those is a claim about a step, and you can only make claims about steps you actually control.
It is also the reason the certificate means something. A Certificate of Analysis tells you what is in the pouch. Knowing the chain tells you why.
We use heat twice, and only twice
Heat is a tool before the mushroom grows and a hazard afterwards. Almost the whole craft is knowing which is which.
- 110-114°COn the substrate
Hot enough to kill what would compete with the mushroom, cool enough to leave the substrate alive. The industry standard is over 121°C, which sterilises it completely - and a dead substrate grows a poorer mushroom.
- 38°COn the mushroom
Once it is grown, heat has nothing left to offer and everything to destroy. So the extract never goes above body temperature, for six weeks. That is Kanzen.
Pasteurised, not sterilised
Substrate has to be treated before the mushroom goes in, or everything else in it grows first. The standard approach is sterilisation: past 121°C, until nothing is alive.
It works, and it overshoots. A sterile substrate is not just free of competitors, it is free of the microbial life a mushroom actually benefits from. You have made the bed perfectly clean and slightly dead.
We hold ours at 110-114°C instead. Hot enough to remove what would compete, cool enough to leave the substrate alive. Finding that window took years, because it is narrow: a few degrees too low and you lose the batch, a few too high and you are back to sterilising.
It uses less energy as well. That was not why we did it, but it is a real consequence of it.
There is a number for this, and ours is low on purpose
Thermal processing has a standard unit for this. It is called F₀, and it states how much lethal heat a process has actually delivered, expressed as the equivalent number of minutes at 121.1°C. It is how sterilisation is specified across food and pharmaceutical manufacturing - and it is why 121°C keeps coming up here. That is the reference point the entire scale is built on.
The scale is logarithmic. Drop ten degrees and lethal heat accumulates roughly ten times more slowly. At 110-114°C we are working at somewhere between a fifth and a tenth of the rate a 121°C process delivers.
Which means we are not taking a slower road to the same destination. We stop well short of it, deliberately. A factory runs substrate to a high F₀ because uniformity is the whole point, and a dead substrate is a predictable one. We run to a low one, because what survives is doing useful work for the mushroom.
Same instrument. Opposite target.
The used substrate goes back to the land
After harvest, the substrate is not waste. It is stacked and left to compost - turned, watered, and given the months it needs to break down into something a field can use.
Then it goes to the farms around us, who work it into their soil. It improves fertility and brings back worms and insects. In onion crops it has been used as a natural deterrent against harmful fungi, which means less chemical treatment on a neighbour's field because of something that came off ours.
That is the other half of the exchange. They give us what they cannot use. We give it back changed.
One thing we have not solved: the substrate bags. They are built to survive pasteurisation, which makes them a high-grade plastic that is difficult to recycle. We are still looking for a facility that will take them. Until we find one, this is the only part of this process that is not regenerative - and the one we are still working to change.
Solar, and a share of the wind
The farm runs on renewable energy: panels on our own roofs, and a share in the wind collective whose turbines stand in the fields around us.
Flevoland holds one of the largest wind parks in Europe, and our farm sits inside it. The turbines in the drone footage further up this page are not scenery - they are the ones keeping the lights on.
We are not going to pretend this is a low-energy business. Growing indoors means holding temperature, humidity and airflow steady around the clock, every day of the year, and pasteurisation runs hot by definition. The demand is real and it is not small.
Which is exactly why we generate our own. There is not much point sending substrate back to the soil if the building it came from runs on somebody else's coal.
Growing it is only half of it
Everything on this page is Dutch. The land, the neighbours, the substrate, the rules we grow under.
What happens next is not. Getting the goodness out of a mushroom without destroying it on the way is a craft the Japanese have been refining for centuries, and our head grower Wouter spent more than fifteen years going back and forth learning it from them.
What happens after the harvest decides how much of all this actually reaches you. That part has a name.