Why Copenhagen’s best restaurants are sourcing their mushrooms from a local shed

Operating from a building half the size of a football penalty box, Bygaard mushroom farm is part of the world’s sustainable urban farming revolution.

BY HARPER PESTINGER

“Why don’t you just grow the food rurally?”

Squeezing its small population into a few main cities leaves more than 60 percent of Denmark occupied by farmland and agricultural use – an industry which accounts for under one percent of the national GDP.

“It’s very bad business.”

Those are the blunt words of Lasse Antoni Carlsen, founder of Copenhagen’s Bygaard mushroom farm.

Starting off as a team of two in the industrial outskirts of the city, the business came about four years ago and produces eight varieties of mushrooms in six rebuilt shipping containers.

“When we first started talking about it, most people were like, ‘why would you even want to bother doing that?'”, Carlsen tells. “‘Denmark is an agricultural country, why don’t you just grow the food rurally, where there’s a lot of space?'”

Tightly packed in to capacity, Bygaard now produces 200kg of mushrooms per day that can be bought or enjoyed in every corner of Copenhagen, including the three-Michelin star restaurant Noma.

As Carlsen says, keeping the production “closer to the customers” reduces the otherwise mind-boggling financial and environmental cost of transportation.

When it comes to the production and distribution of oyster mushrooms – part of Bygaard’s stock in trade – 96 percent of the CO₂ emissions can be put down to transport and packaging, according to Concito, Denmark’s green think tank. Inherently then, hyperlocal production of food lessens the burden for the planet and wallet alike.

Thanks to both Copenhagen’s pedal-friendly infrastructure and Bygaard’s ethos of sustainability, the business exclusively delivers by bicycle – 50kg per courier.

In addition to that, the mushrooms’ packaging “isn’t really processed”; they’re sent out in cardboard boxes (to restaurants) and wooden crates (to supermarkets).

“We deliver to around 100 restaurants,” Carlsen says. “Chefs send me a text then we have the mushrooms at the kitchen in a couple of hours.”

Mushrooms in and of themselves are one of the least impactful foods produced in Denmark too.

One of the few natural decomposers of wood, the fungi are grown on and eat into sterilised hardwood – sourced by Bygaard as a byproduct from the sawmilling industry. On that hardwood, other residual industry materials – such as sawdust and straw – are weaponised to kill unwanted bacteria.

While Bygaard’s products end up on plates and in bellies, Carlsen says mushrooms can also be used as “building materials” or “styrofoam alternatives”.