Helsieni

Six months after starting the company, we decided to run a crowdfunding campaign to ftnance the building of a mushroom farm...

By Chris Holtslag

Helsieni is a small mushroom farm and webstore in southern Finland. We grow primarily oyster mushrooms and sell do-it-yourself growkits to home growers and gardeners. The company was founded in 2016 in Helsinki and our name comes from this birthplace combined with the word ‘sieni’ which means mushroom in Finnish.

Finland has a rich culture of mushroom foraging, but not many people are growing mushrooms. In late 2015, we – Helsieni founders Sini, Stéphane and Chris – travelled to the Netherlands for a four-day internship at Rotterzwam, which had started a mushroom company a few years prior in Rotterdam. We were inspired by the Rotterzwam Growkit and decided we wanted to bring this concept to Finland. We started out by importing their growkits and simultaneously started developing our own design with locally sourced tubs. Six months after starting the company, we decided to run a crowdfunding campaign to finance the building of a mushroom farm, where we could grow fresh oyster mushrooms on a substrate of coffee grounds and oat husks, for the local restaurants. The crowdfunding was a success and we bought and converted two shipping containers for growing oyster mushrooms. At the same time, we started giving workshops and over the years we added other products to our webstore, which is the main channel we sell our products through.