Dr. Nandkumar M. Kamat
There is a particular kind of stubbornness required to grow the same crop, in the same coastal state, every single day for 32 years, and to keep scaling it while almost everyone around you is growing something else. This stubbornness belongs to Dr. Sangam Kurade, a Goa-based food technologist who is widely regarded today as India’s largest producer of the humble white button mushroom, Agaricus bisporus, and is sometimes called, not entirely in jest, the country’s
‘Mushroom King’.
Kurade did not arrive at the mushrooms by accident. He trained formally for it, earning a food technology degree from Marathwada Agricultural University before travelling to the United States for a master’s in food technology at the University of Hawaii, an MBA in business marketing from Pacific Western University, and finally a doctorate in food technology from the University of Tennessee.
Most young Indians who acquired this kind of American training in the 1990s did not return home to build cropping rooms in a fishing and tourism state better known for cashew, coconut, and rice. Kurade did. He first worked briefly at his father’s food consultancy before deciding to build something of his own on his family’s land in Goa in 1994. What he built began small: about five cropping rooms producing roughly 500 kg of mushrooms a day, at a modest 15% yield relative to the weight of compost used. Anyone who has tried mushroom cultivation, even at a hobbyist scale, knows how unforgiving the process can be. Unlike field crops, mushrooms are grown indoors, in darkness, and under controlled humidity on compost that must be prepared, pasteurised, and inoculated with precision. A single lapse in temperature, ventilation, or hygiene can wipe out an entire crop cycle. Kurade’s early years were, by his own account, a matter of learning this the hard way, batch after batch, and I had been a close witness to his struggles, his innovative, optimistic spirit, and the vision he had painted before me 25 years ago.
The Canacona flash flood of 2009 damaged his operations enough to force a rebuild. During that rebuild, the enterprise adopted vertical-growing technology and split itself into two farm sites in Goa. Vertical cultivation, now a buzzword in Indian agri-tech circles, was for Kurade simply a practical response to a flood that occurred a decade and a half ago. By the middle of the 2010s, his daily output had climbed to approximately 7,000 kg, and the cropping infrastructure had expanded to
105 rooms.
The company trades under two registered entities, Zuari Foods & Farms Private Limited and Tropical Mushrooms (Goa) Private Limited, which are jointly marketed to consumers as Dr Kurade’s, with its base in Caranzalem. They now harvest 28,000 kilograms, or 28 tonnes, of fresh mushrooms every single day, across roughly 1,20,000 square meters of growing area, on a standard 90-day cropping cycle, with three separate levels of quality inspection before any mushroom leaves the farm. They produce just over 10,000 tonnes of mushrooms annually.
What makes Kurade’s story worth telling is not simply the scale but the resourcefulness behind it. He speaks of experimenting with mushroom compost made from sugarcane bagasse and using ordinary river alluvium sourced locally as the casing layer under which mushrooms are grown, rather than relying on imported substrate formulations that most commercial growers default to. This is, in its own quiet way, applied science: adapting a temperate-climate crop to Goa’s tropical humidity using whatever agricultural residue and mineral material the region already had lying around. Instead of being dumped, spent compost is converted into bio-fertilizer and handed back to Goan farmers, closing a nutrient loop that begins and ends in the same soil.
The environmental bookkeeping around the operation is considerable: roughly 20,000 tonnes of agricultural waste sourced from across the country every year is converted into growing substrate; 90% of the water used daily in harvesting is treated and recycled through an in-house effluent treatment plant; vertical growing is chosen partly because it limits how much land needs to be cleared, alongside active tree replanting around the farms. Whatever one makes of corporate self-description, the underlying logic is sound agricultural chemistry: mushrooms are essentially waste-to-protein converters, and an operation of this size is, in effect, processing a small mountain of crop residue into food annually.
The product line has grown well beyond plain button mushrooms. The company now grows exotic varieties, including shiitake, portobello, and king oyster, and has expanded into what the food industry calls functional foods and future foods: mushroom-based snacks and beverages, nutraceutical extracts, and even mycelium-derived skincare formulations, alongside exploratory work on mushroom-based leather substitutes and biodegradable packaging. Whether all of these succeed commercially is beside the point; the willingness to keep experimenting with a single fungal organism across food, wellness, and materials is unusual for an entrepreneur who started out simply trying to keep a compost room at the right humidity.
Recognition has followed, albeit modestly. In 2014, the Directorate of Mushroom Research under the Indian Council of Agricultural Research conferred on him its Mushroom Grower’s Award, an acknowledgment from the central government’s own mushroom research establishment of two decades of sustained contribution to the sector. The following year, he was elected president of the Federation of Indian Micro and Small and Medium Enterprises for 2015-16, having earlier served the organisation as an executive member and as vice president of the Goa Industries Association. He has also been associated with the National Institute of Food Technology Entrepreneurship and Management, various Goa government committees on agro-food processing, and the Bureau of Indian Standards Committee for Foods
and Spices.
He has carried Goa’s mushroom story to international platforms, addressing a forum held alongside the China International Mushroom New Products and Equipment Expo in Hefei in 2016, where he made the case that if India diverted just one percent of its roughly 600 million tonnes of annual agricultural waste into mushroom cultivation, national output could rise roughly tenfold, from around three lakh tonnes to three million tonnes. He returned to that same theme, a decade of scale later, as a featured speaker at the India Mushroom Summit in Bengaluru in 2025.
Notably, the enterprise has remained a family concern rather than turning to external capital for support. Kurade remains the chairman and managing director; his son Anuj, a graduate of Pennsylvania State University, now serves as executive director and is credited with driving growth strategy, distribution, and new product development, while also incubating his own ventures in biomass enzymes, renewable fuel briquettes, and a mushroom-and-jackfruit meat alternative. A chief of staff manages day-to-day operations, freeing Kurade to keep doing what he has apparently never stopped doing since 1994: thinking about how to grow more mushrooms, more sustainably, in a state that nobody expected to become India’s mushroom capital.
There is a modest lesson in all this for anyone considering agricultural entrepreneurship outside the usual crops and states: Kurade did not chase a fashionable sector; he picked an unglamorous fungus, trained rigorously for it, absorbed a natural disaster as a forcing function for reinvention, and kept scaling steadily rather than spectacularly. Three decades later, a state known worldwide for its beaches quietly produces over 10,000 tonnes of mushrooms annually. This is not a small achievement and deserves to be known well beyond the trade circles that have tracked it so far. Goans addicted to the wild and expensive roen olmi must take notice.
