From Corporate Careers to Mushroom Farming: A Journey of Friendship and Entrepreneurship

Four friends – two engineers, an IIT-Kharagpur graduate, and an IIM graduate- who left jobs in the US to return home decided to shun their promising careers. Equipped with top tech and management credentials, their journeys in the corporate world were chartered: their stories perfectly embodying the traditional Indian definition of success. Yet, they decided to walk away. They wanted to pursue a different dream. They wanted their own business. They wanted to grow mushrooms. The reason for choosing this uncharted journey was simple. They wanted to disallow physical distances and separate career paths to come in the way of their childhood friendship. And this unique experiment has become a blueprint for what is now a Rs 15-crore-turnover business. This story begins with Naveen Patwal and Amit Kumar Sharma. They were childhood friends. They co-founded this business in 2006. Naveen, then 27, had just completed his BTech in Computer Science from Faridabad’s Career Institute of Technology and Management (CITM), and Amit had a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Jamia Millia Islamia. Both were set for engineering careers but instead took the plunge into mushroom farming. In 2012, Naveen married Poonam Sharma, whom he and Amit had known since their growing-up years. A year later, Poonam, an IIT-Kharagpur graduate, left a promising banking career to join the business with them. She had been following it since the beginning, so the switch, though unconventional, felt natural. Their fourth partner, Sunny Gupta, charted an equally unconventional professional path. He met Naveen and Amit in 2000 through a mutual friend. They have been friends ever since. After graduating from IIM Calcutta in 2009, he worked as a product management consultant with The Bank of New York Mellon in Chennai and Jersey City, US, for four years before returning to India and joining the mushroom business. Sunny was persuaded by Naveen, who showed him the profit projections. “The business was basically Naveen’s ploy to keep all of us friends together,” Poonam says, sitting on a grey sofa in their sprawling Faridabad house, with her husband and children. In 2006, Naveen and Amit had been planning to join forces in an entrepreneurial venture and had reached Selaqui, Dehradun, looking for options. “…..we knew this man in Dehradun, so we visited his factory. During our conversation, he told us that if we wanted to grow mushrooms, there was a 90 percent chance of failure,” Naveen recalls. The friends took this as a challenge and turned their attention to mushroom farming. They used all their savings to buy an acre of land in Roorkee — because few people were already growing mushrooms in the area — while they waited for a bank loan. “We applied for Rs 1.35 crore… it was a huge loan, even our parents were not convinced. After all, if we could not pay it back, the bank would take away our home, land, everything,” says Naveen. Hailing from Uttarakhand’s Pauri Garhwal, Naveen’s father moved his family to Faridabad when Naveen was young, and it’s Naveen’s childhood memories that have driven his interest in mushrooms. “We have a pahadi background, and in Pauri Garhwal, families have been foraging for wild mushrooms for so long. There, we used to find Gucchi mushrooms in the wild,” he says. A young Naveen used to ask his father how the village decided if a new mushroom they spotted was poisonous or not, and his father would jokingly say, “We would give it to the oldest person in the village. If he was fine after eating it, it was not poisonous.” Remembering that exchange, a laughing Naveen says: “As the internet says, all mushrooms are edible, but some are only edible once.” Poonam interjects, reassuringly: “We don’t do that anymore; we just check….” In 2006, when Naveen and Amit bet everything on mushrooms, they faced many setbacks in creating the right conditions in their newly bought, enclosed farm. As Naveen puts it, “the smallest external factor can change the way mushrooms grow”. While maintaining a fixed temperature with air conditioning is critical, other environmental factors also impact growth. “If even one thing goes wrong, the entire batch is spoiled,” Naveen says. They learnt this the hard way when they once used a bad batch of fermented compost with mushroom spawn (“the seed”). After waiting for a crop, they got “absolutely nothing… zero mushrooms”. Facing losses, Naveen took it upon himself to install the AC panels and other machines in the farm. “We had many failed batches. But in 2011, we finally stabilised our production,” he says. Down the line, they replaced cotton with polyfill to make mushroom spawn. On this technique, Naveen and Amit published a paper in the journal Mushroom Research. Now, they also use Tyvek, a filter material on spawn bags that blocks contaminants while allowing vital gas exchange. Transporting the mushrooms to markets was another issue. They used their own cars and ACs in them, but it was expensive. Then came reefer trucks, but the ice cubes sometimes damaged the mushrooms. Now, they use ice packs along with coolers. As Naveen and Amit laid the groundwork, Poonam was with them in spirit. “Before going into business, Naveen called, saying, ‘Should I do this? It’s a 90 per cent risk rate.’ But I had faith in his success,” she remembers. As the business grew and Amit and Naveen would sit and talk about it, Poonam would think, “What am I doing here (at her office in the bank), when I want to be there?” Her parents warned against “putting all their eggs in one basket”, but Naveen’s dedication eventually gave her the courage to quit her job. From a manager at Small Industries Development Bank of India, she moved into the mushroom business full-time. Their brand Planet Mushroom — a name that Shanaya, their 13-year-old daughter, came up with — aims to include a variety of mushrooms in people’s daily diet. For this, Naveen has taken it upon himself to learn everything there is to be learnt about mushroom farming. For instance, which wood should shiitake mushrooms be grown on to give them the best flavour? Oak wood, he promptly replies. What is key to successful mushroom farming? Tailoring the AC, he says. Shanaya cuts in, with a playful quip: “My father fixes ACs.” This playfulness is also reflected in the name of their home WiFi network — EatMushroomDaily — and as Naveen excitedly says, “I want to be buried with mushrooms around me, in a coffin made with mushrooms…decomposing with mushrooms,” Poonam jokes. In 2013, after Poonam and Sunny had joined the business, the four friends started living on their Roorkee farm with their families. In this small town, they worked alongside each other and eventually built a small community. “We would meet each other for dinner, our children were friends with each other, and Shanaya would even bring her school friends to the farm to show them around,” says Poonam. But when Covid hit, things took a turn for the worse. At the time, the friends had started operating a second farm and their production had peaked at 4-5 tonnes a day. Then almost overnight, there was no demand for mushrooms. They had to throw away at least 100 tonnes of mushrooms, which, Naveen estimates, amounted to a Rs 1.5 crore loss. As mushrooms weren’t recognised under vegetables or farming commodities, their trucks weren’t allowed to pass during the restrictions. They were eventually able to send some of their produce to the wholesale markets, but the price was abysmally low, and the losses continued. This is when a realisation dawned. “We couldn’t rely on wholesale markets and needed to reach out to the customers directly,” Naveen says. In 2022, the friends launched Planet Mushroom, a Welkins brand that sells mushrooms directly to customers. Today, they also have vendor codes with almost all major five-star properties in metro cities. “It shows how far we have come,” Naveen explains. However, production is still 90 per cent button mushrooms, and the bulk of the business remains wholesale, particularly through adhatis. The partners, though, want to increase their specialty mushroom production — particularly shiitake, king oyster, cordyceps, morels, portobello, cremini, oyster, milky mushroom and lion’s mane. Naveen believes the demand for these varieties will increase. “Restaurants have an important role… If chefs introduce these mushrooms through dishes in restaurants, people can first experience the taste and then try cooking them at home,” he says. He learnt this lesson from a chef in Goa. He had been producing shiitake for almost a year but had not eaten it as the smell was “strong and unpleasant”. Then Chef Satish Shridhar, who runs Cantine Indienne, a vegan restaurant in Goa, sautéed fresh shiitake and served it to Naveen. After that first taste, Naveen now feels the smell is like fresh garlic — strong but something that adds that missing element to dishes. “Sometimes the challenge isn’t the mushroom,” he says “but teaching consumers how to understand and adapt to a new taste”.