April 22nd, 2021, Emeryville, California. The weather was crisp, and expectation, intrigue and anxiety were in the air at MycoWorks’ new 64th Street facility. After years and months of hard work, the team was finally preparing for a remarkable harvest.
Proving the company’s ability to scale up, automate and establish a replicable process, the 64th street harvest would mark the beginning of unlimited, potential growth.
According to schedule, tomorrow the team would harvest the plant’s first sheet of Fine Mycelium™, a fully customizable and traceable natural material that compares to the finest animal leathers.
Production workers and engineers were rushing between stations with excitement, Marketing was ready to see the product they’d been building anticipation around for months, and executives were steering an atmosphere of confidence and calm. But everyone knew tomorrow would be the moment of truth. Being able to grow Fine Mycelium at the 64th Street plant would mean MycoWorks had scaled up to produce (or I should say grow) Fine Mycelium beyond the volumes of an artist’s workshop, to finally meet the fashion industry’s growing demand for this remarkable new material. But in a surprise turn of events, due to nature’s own unique timing, the 64th street harvest came one day early.
Without any notice, and in a timely twist of fate, 64th Street’s first Fine Mycelium sheet was harvested on Earth Day, April 22nd, 2021. Coincidence? We’ll never know. Nature has its ways.
And while the entire world was celebrating Mother Earth, a milestone for the future of biomaterials had been achieved.
Demonstrating the viability of MycoWorks’ Fine Mycelium process at the new Emeryville plant and the scalability of the technology platform, the 64th Street harvest was a game changer for the future of natural materials and for the biotech industry at large. A gigantic step towards bringing the first made-to-order biomaterial to consumers around the world and a breakthrough for product design and materials science, this celebrated sheet is living proof of MycoWorks’ ability to scale our patented process to create the world’s first scalable production facility for Fine Mycelium.
Reishi™ 56772611 was harvested at 11am PST: a smooth and superb sheet of Fine Mycelium. It was the moment everyone had been waiting for. Growing made-to-order material at the scale the market has been demanding was no longer a dream.
Giving designers complete freedom to imagine and bring to life their ideal material, to fully personalize and fine tune it to their own specifications and customized performance needs, from initial growth to the final stages of harvest—this was now a scalable reality.
Reishi™ 56772611 is completely unique. As with any work of art, each sheet is one of a kind: a living organism grown in its own specialized environment. Every single choice and slight change in the process transfers into each final sheet. With this inherent uniqueness, cultivating the uniformity and predictability that brands desire, can only be achieved with systemic, data-based traceability.
A platform that shines full transparency onto the entire growth process from inoculation to harvest, allowing our experts to track, edit, engineer and modify our Fine Mycelium as it grows.
Tailoring it to the precise specifications desired and improving quality at every stage of the growth,“There is art in this manufacturing process. You are in an intimate relationship with a living organism and this changes the entire production,” observes Anthony Saucedo, MycoWorks Plant Director.
Fully engineerable, Fine Mycelium™ goes beyond just a “sustainable” substitute. This is a new category of its own.
MycoWorks’ Fine Mycelium is a unique technology: a patented process that opens up a world of design possibilities through offering unprecedented control over features and quality. A turning point for the industry. Creating unique products that align to consumers’ evolving values around transparency in materials and manufacturing is now achievable without compromising quality, aesthetics, durability or performance. Reishi™ 56772611 is living proof of MycoWorks’ capacity to scale our patented technology, from an artist’s studio to a large volume process involving many hands; to the automation and mechanization of a manufacturing plant designed to process high volumes of our proprietary trays—
the world’s first production facility for Fine Mycelium.
Meeting the growing demands of designers and customers today, this is the beginning of a new era for materials and design.
