A GROWING CONCERN

from Grocery & Retail Ireland Magazine, Winter 2022

20 YEARS

Goldcircle Mushrooms Ltd is a leading grower and marketer of fresh mushrooms for the UK and Ireland. Based in Tirnaneill, Co. Monaghan, the family-owned business is committed to providing healthy, delicious fresh products created with passion.

a nationally recognised model of collaborative best practice, enabling its members to achieve and maintain a competitive edge and delivering benefits at every stage of the supply chain.

Goldcircle Mushrooms was established in 2000 when Kieran Walsh, who was previously general manager of Monaghan Mushrooms, bought his family home and eight growing houses in the backyard. He began to grow eight tons of white mushrooms a week and sold these to local marketing companies and direct to UK wholesalers.

Fast-forward 22 years and Goldcircle Mushrooms now employs 240 people and produces fresh mushrooms across four of its own farms. About 90% of its produce is exported to the UK where its customers include Lidl, Aldi, Iceland, Brake’s and TJ Morris. Sysco Ireland in Dublin is another major client. Morgan McLernon Transport and Derry Refrigerated Transport look after the majority of the company’s haulage needs.

Goldcircle Mushrooms works in partnership with four other mushroom growers from the Northway Mushrooms Group. Headquartered in Dungannon, Northway is a producer organisation representing over 20 Irish growers, with Goldcircle Mushrooms being the largest partner. Northway is

Goldcircle Mushrooms supplies over 15,000 tons annually of fresh white and brown mushrooms directly to retail, food service, food manufacturing and wholesale markets. Mushrooms are a staple in many people’s diets as they are grown indoors all-year round and are less sensitive to the outside weather like other vegetables are. They are rich in B vitamins, riboflavin, niacin and pantothenic acid, a combination which helps protect heart health. Fresh mushrooms can also be enriched with Vitamin D by exposing the fresh mushrooms to UV light. Goldcircle Mushrooms has the latest UV booster that pulses the mushrooms with Xenon LED lights.

In spite of this, the fresh mushroom market is seeing a slump in kilos sold year-on-year. In the Republic of Ireland tonnage is down by 11.5% and by 14% in the UK.

Like most good food products, it is the ingredients that make a great end product. In the world of fresh mushrooms, this is compost. Made from Irish straw and Irish chicken litter, it enriches the soil and supplies nutrients for the healthy growth of mushrooms. It also minimises food miles at the offset. Collectively, the Northway growers committed their EU levy funds to build a state-of-the-art £25 million compost production facility in Ballygawley, Co. Tyrone in 2018. The facility produces over 42,000 tons of mushroom compost / substrate per annum. The excellent quality of the compost gives the Northway growers consistently good crops and yields.

Similar to other businesses and individuals, Goldcircle Mushrooms is feeling the soaring cost of each commodity. In 2021, overall costs rose by around 6%. So far in 2022, they have increased a further 10%. The company works closely with its customers to be as transparent as possible about the levels of inflation and tries, where possible, to value engineer costs out of the category.

“The current, and past three years have been a challenge from maintaining staff levels in this labour-intensive category to managing the relentless level of inflation.

“We stay positive and look at projects to reduce costs and add tasty new products to our portfolio,” says Goldcircle Mushrooms sales and marketing manager Denise Stock. A subject at the top of the Co. Monaghan company’s action list is automated harvesting. Every mushroom is currently harvested by hand and placed into its primary packaging. As alluded to by Denise, the labour market is tight and a level of automation needs to be found. To this end, Goldcircle Mushrooms supported the Mushroom Machine Company Ltd in Lisburn, with a pilot project for a semi-automatic harvesting machine. The ‘game-changer’ compact and mobile unit is operated by one person and achieves double the hourly rate that manual harvesting does with a knife.

Looking to the future, Goldcircle Mushrooms plans to introduce various added value food innovations to the convenience / chilled food category with mushrooms being the main ingredient. With the support of Enterprise Ireland, the company is exploring new processing methods with the aim of developing unique mushroom products to enter the added value market.

“We have had many enquiries from Retail and Foodservice customers requesting NPD for vegetarian ready meals that contain mushrooms,” Denise added.

Passionate about growing fresh, tasty and high-quality mushrooms, Goldcircle Mushrooms would like to take this opportunity to thank its customers and suppliers for their continued support, as well as its staff for their hard work, dedication and skill.