Fungal Materials Lab Grows Packaging Prototypes From Brewery Waste
Mycelium panels cured in a warehouse near the grain elevators could displace foam in niche shipping uses.
A small lab near the grain elevators is growing packaging prototypes from mycelium fed on brewery waste, aiming at protective inserts for electronics and glassware.
The operation occupies 6,400 square feet of a former feed warehouse on Talbert Street, a building whose chief virtue, its founder says, is that it was already dark and already damp. Nine employees work there, four of them full time.
Founder Kim Adeyemi partners with two local breweries for spent grain and with a university materials course for testing. Early panels pass drop tests for lightweight goods but not yet for heavy industrial parts.
Scaling remains the villain.
## How it works, roughly
Spent grain arrives twice weekly by van — about 1,400 pounds a week between the two breweries, material that previously went to a hog operation forty minutes inland and before that to the landfill. It is pasteurized, mixed with a proprietary blend the lab will only describe as "mostly agricultural," inoculated with a strain of fungus, and packed into aluminum molds.
Over five to seven days the mycelium threads through the substrate and binds it into a solid. The panel is then heat-treated to kill the organism, which stops growth and, more importantly, stops anything from sprouting inside a customer's shipping box.
The output is a beige, slightly fibrous block roughly the density of a firm sponge. It compresses, it does not spring back much, and it composts in a home bin in about six weeks — a figure the lab has tested nine times and publishes with a range of four to eleven weeks depending on moisture.
## The test results, including the bad ones
Drop testing runs through a materials course at the regional university, which Adeyemi says was less a cost-saving measure than a credibility one: the students have no stake in the answer.
Course instructor Dr. Perpetua Vance summarized three semesters of results without softening them. Panels protecting loads under four pounds — small electronics, single glass vessels, instrument components — passed the standard 30-inch drop series at rates comparable to expanded polystyrene, with 47 of 52 test articles surviving undamaged against 49 of 52 for foam.
Above roughly eight pounds, the picture reverses. The mycelium panels fail by crushing rather than rebounding, meaning the first impact absorbs energy well and the second impact absorbs almost none. In a six-drop sequence with a 14-pound load, foam passed 11 of 12 tests and the fungal panels passed 3.
"It is a good single-event material and a poor multi-event material," Vance said. "For a package that gets dropped once, that is fine. Nobody's package gets dropped once."
Adeyemi does not argue with the finding. Her position is that the addressable market for single-event, sub-eight-pound protective packaging is large enough to build a company on, and that chasing the heavy-goods segment would be the mistake that kills it.
## Scaling, humidity, and a real skeptic
Humidity control and consistent density are harder in a real warehouse than in a glossy pitch deck. The lab's growth room holds 78 to 84 percent relative humidity in winter and drifts to the low nineties in August, and density across a single production run has varied by as much as 19 percent — enough that a customer specifying a tolerance would currently have to reject roughly one panel in six.
Current output is about 900 panels a month. A commercial contract of the kind Adeyemi is pursuing would require 12,000, and the growth room would need to roughly triple in footprint or halve in cycle time.
The most useful skepticism has come from Marguerite Osei-Bonsu, who ran packaging procurement for a regional distributor for two decades and now consults.
"Everyone who builds one of these labs shows me a panel and a compost photograph," she said. "What I need is a spec sheet, a second facility so I am not single-sourced, and a price within forty percent of foam. Right now the honest number is that this material costs about two and a half times foam per unit of protection. That is not a fatal number. It is a number that means your customer is buying a story, and stories have budgets, and budgets have quarters where they are cut."
Adeyemi's counter is that the cost gap has narrowed from roughly 4x in 2024 and that the largest remaining component is labor at the demolding station, which she believes is automatable. She also concedes Osei-Bonsu's second-source point entirely, calling it "the objection I have no answer for."
If performance holds, the first commercial customers are likely local e-commerce shippers who already pay for sustainability claims and want them to be true. Three are in paid pilot: a coastal ceramics studio, a small-batch spirits bottler, and a scientific-instrument refurbisher whose products sit almost exactly in the weight band where the material works.
Funding is a $1.4 million seed round, of which about $500,000 remains. Adeyemi said the company needs either a signed volume contract or a bridge by the fourth quarter, and that she has told the staff so.
Public communication remains a deliberate practice at the lab. Figures are released with uncertainty bands, and Adeyemi has a standing rule that the failure table from the university testing appears on the same page as the success table, in the same font size — a policy she adopted after watching a competitor's claims collapse under scrutiny in 2024.
Tours run monthly; visitors must accept that it smells faintly like a forest floor after rain. On the last one, a retired brewer who had spent thirty years paying to haul spent grain away picked up a finished panel, turned it over twice, pressed a thumb into it, and asked what it would cost to buy a case of the stuff to ship his daughter's wedding glasses across the country. Adeyemi told him the honest price. He bought four.
Reporting for this story was prepared for The Harbor Ledger’s science desk. Tips:newsroom@theharborledger.com