Tivoli Mushrooms Is a Delight for Fungi Fanatics- Hudson Valley Table Article

Tivoli Mushrooms is a boutique mushroom farm that combines passion, science, and community into all it does.

Tivoli Mushrooms and its sister company, GO Mushrooms, are located in Hillsdale and Hudson, respectively. Doing in-house cultivating and farming, owner Devon Gilroy and his team are passionate about their products.

From Hobby to Business

Mushrooms have always been part of Devon Gilroy’s life. He was drawn to them from a young age, as he grew up in the restaurant business and his mother is a horticulturalist. As a chef himself, he gained a deeper understanding of the different mushrooms and the ways that they can be utilized in the culinary industry. He says, “I kind of feel like I’ve always understood plants, and there’s something very secretive about mushrooms, and there’s a lot of lore and superstition.”

The groundwork for what would become Tivoli Mushrooms came as a hobby for Gilroy. While taking walks, he would document mushrooms he stumbled across on social media. “It was a very exciting idea trying to understand what mushrooms were and how they grew and why and their seasons. So when I moved to the Hudson Valley, I began walking in the woods, having my first real experience with seasonal mushrooms.” The highlight is “learning what they were and then utilizing them in restaurants.”

Tivoli Mushrooms itself blossomed from the perfect storm of Gilroy’s hobby and profession. He began foraging for mushrooms that he could use in restaurants and, over time, was able to sell them to other chefs. This transitioned to purchasing cultivated mushrooms and distributing them until 2016-2017, when a bad foraging year hit in the winter, and Gilroy resolved to teach himself how to grow mushrooms.

Operating a Mushroom Farm

Tivoli Mushrooms grows its own mushrooms onsite, producing thousands of pounds every week. It cultivates mushrooms using local inputs and byproducts such as soy or rye to mix, hydrate, and pasteurize the fungi. That produces mushroom varieties such as Blue Oyster, Yellow Oyster, Pink Oyster, Italian Oyster, Black Oyster, King Oyster, Lions Mane, Hen of the Woods, Peppino Chestnut, and more. The company adjusts seasonally as color profiles and external temperatures affect which mushrooms will grow best, even in the controlled environment on the farm. The team continues to learn how conditions, both internal and external, will affect different mushrooms and the role science has in home growing and cultivating products.

Tivoli Mushrooms may be considered a boutique farm, but it has substantial operations. Gilroy explains that the farm has several teams that work rotationally to keep everything running smoothly. This includes the farm team which mixes substrates, pasteurizes products, and ensures storage; the lab team which furthers the process by inoculating and incubating products; and the harvest team that does harvesting, documenting, and storing material. Separately, it has teams that handle input management, organization and cleaning, and pack-out.

Over the years, Tivoli Mushrooms switched to conducting its own distribution, since mushrooms are perishable and the farm wants to ensure the best quality goes out, especially since it “harvests and distributes about 1,000 pounds a day,” even if it slows down a bit in July. Distribution is a large part of the business as it provides to restaurants, nonprofits, and farmers’ markets in Massachusetts, the Hudson Valley, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. You can also find Tivoli Mushrooms products in grocery stores, such as Adams Fairacre Farms.

On the Horizon: GO Mushrooms

Tivoli Mushrooms is operating smoothly, so Gilroy is excited to shift into growing its sister company, GO Mushrooms. Along his journey into cultivating wild mushrooms, Gilroy became interested in medicinal offerings and began to delve into creating his own products after being let down by outside sources. He and his team created their own lab and company, which is run by Charlene Chai, Devon Gilroy’s partner.

“GO Mushrooms uses high-quality technology to essentially reduce all of our material into resin,” Gilroy shares. “Then we have a series of ovens and freeze dryers that we can take that resin, process it, and then utilize it in honey or oxy mills or beverages and powders.”

He and Chai are excited for the continued growth of GO Mushrooms with products such as honey and a beverage line. These will be another addition to the “very rewarding experience to be able to make very high-quality extractions.”

Gilroy adds, “I may have started this, but we wouldn’t be where we are right now unless I had good people with me.” With each new initiative, Tivoli Mushrooms takes something unique and uses a combination of passion and science to share its best with the community.

Tivoli Mushrooms
Hillsdale and Hudson