Meet Joel Tharpe | Organic Mushroom Farmer

We had the good fortune of connecting with Joel Tharpe and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Joel, can you walk us through the thought-process of starting your business?
I first became interested in mushrooms back in 2017 while working at Atlas Restaurant in Buckhead Atlanta. The chef there sourced almost everything locally and one day one of our servers came in with a basket of orange mushrooms to sell to the chef. I immediately started asking questions about them and where he got them. He told me he got them from the woods and I couldn’t believe it. He told me there was a certification you could take to become a wild mushroom forager and these mushrooms were plentiful in Georgia and sold for quite a bit of money so I signed up to get certified that summer. From then on I was extremely interested in foraging and would go out every week of the summer looking for chanterelles. It wasn’t until the end of 2022 that I started considering indoor mushroom cultivation which is what our company does now. I saw that there were essentially two representations of “mushroom farms” in the local Atlanta market. You had massive producers who were growing massive amounts (think over 1000 lbs a week) of lower quality mushrooms that then got sold to distributors to sell on to retail stores and restaurants. And then on the flip side you had small local farms who could really only sell at farmers markets because they had to charge a much higher price to meet their profit goals. So I decided we needed something a bit in the middle of that. So we grow mushrooms on a commercial scale to sell them wholesale direct to restaurants and retail stores and we charge a fair price so that those stores can still make money but also sell fantastic, local, organic mushrooms to their customers without breaking anyones bank in the process. We skip right past the distributor which saves the stores and restaurants money and also ensures that our mushrooms arrive at their final destination super fresh and delicious!

What should our readers know about your business?
Our business, Mycelial Minds, just got started officially in August 2023. Prior to that though we probably put in a year of research on exactly what we wanted to do and how we wanted to do it. We had to do market research to ensure that there were even businesses interested in what we were wanting to do and that required a lot of cold calling to restaurants and retail stores asking if they would be interested in local, organic mushrooms. Once we figured out that there was some interest in what we wanted to sell we then needed to start looking into how to do it. Growing mushrooms is a very technical process that takes a lot of very specific conditions to get right. Its part art and part science. So we had to figure out when growing on a large scale exactly what the best way to do that was going to be. And then came the actual selling of the mushrooms which was extremely nerve racking. We had gotten relatively firm agreements from our restaurants and retailers but there wasn’t exactly a signed contract so we were hoping that if we grew the mushrooms that they would still want them. Luckily for us, everyone who said they wanted them actually did and we still supply all of their mushrooms today. Now I feel like we’re at a pretty stable point. We take weekly orders and fulfill them and our customers seem like they couldn’t be happier with our products. The next step is looking at expansion from here. Obviously we’ve opted to start very small to minimize risk but now that things are looking relatively good we’re starting to think about where we’ll go from here. We hope to one day supply multiple cities in the Southeast with fresh, local mushrooms. Our concept is not meant to be scaled to infinity. That’s the biggest mistake that any large farm that was once a small farm has made. Once you get too big, you become impossible to manage properly and quality rapidly drops. However, what our concept is is replicable. We want to put a small, local mushroom farm in every city in the Southeast. We’re starting with Atlanta. Once we feel well established here we hope to then expand on to Savannah and then Charleston and after that we may move north to Nashville or Chattanooga or south to Tampa or Miami. Only time will tell but we want to be a part of the local food revolution going on in this country and be able to supply our region with high quality, delicious, and local mushrooms.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
This is a tough one because there are so many avenues to go down. I lived in Atlanta for 10 years prior to moving to Athens and then south of Atlanta where I live now and while in Atlanta I only ever worked in restaurants so I was very tied into the food and beverage scene in the city. One night would absolutely be dedicated to Ponce starting with wings at The Local, if MJQ were still open I would go there and hang out for a majority of the night, but with it being closed I would go to the Clermont Lounge for a bit and then maybe hit the Plaza Diner for late night food. Another day would be entirely dedicated to Buford Highway and hitting a ton of different cultural food up there, from authentic Mexican and South American cuisine to Vietnamese and Korean. I think that trend would just continue indefinitely for me, just bouncing from one neighborhood to the next and going to their bars and restaurants. As Anthony Bourdain once said, “Eat at a local restaurant tonight. Get the cream sauce. Have a cold pint at 4 o’clock in a mostly empty bar. Go somewhere you’ve never been. Listen to someone you think may have nothing in common with you. Order the steak rare. Eat an oyster. Have a negroni. Have two. Be open to a world where you may not understand or agree with the person next to you, but have a drink with them anyways. Eat slowly. Tip your server. Check in on your friends. Check in on yourself. Enjoy the ride.” When traveling this is a mantra I always live by.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
I would have to say a huge thanks has to go out to Chef Chris Grossman, formerly of Atlas, where he was executive chef. He now owns The Chastain in Buckhead and was one of our first customers when we started this new venture! I learned so much about food and the importance of local, heirloom produce from him and first got into foraging while working under him at Atlas. I would also have to mention Tradd Cotter who taught the mushroom certification course that I took back in 2017. His book on mushroom cultivation never collects dust on our shelves because I am constantly referencing something in it on any given week. He runs his own mushroom farm, Mushroom Mountain, in South Carolina and is on the cutting edge of mycological research to continuously learn about them and to get more and more people interested in mushrooms and their importance in our world.

Website: www.mycelialminds.com

Instagram: @mycelial.minds