Our Mission and Vision
Gulf Spore is a mushroom biotech company in Mississippi that harnesses the power of functional mushrooms to improve your quality of life and solve many of the world’s leading problems, such as food waste. Functional mushrooms are renowned for having unique compounds that are beneficial for humans, pets, and livestock. To efficiently access these unique compounds, special extraction processes must be performed to break the tough walls of mushrooms and retrieve these desired compounds. Gulf Spore specializes in advanced mushroom extraction techniques, enabling us to more efficiently access those desirable compounds that upgrade your wellbeing. We use sound waves to break open the cell walls, called ultrasonication. Furthermore, we only use fruiting bodies (i.e., the mushroom), while others may utilize myceliated grains and fillers. In other words, we don’t cut corners, so that we can...
extract the full potential of mushrooms.
Gulf Spore only uses the highest quality ingredients for our extracts, including organic substrate to produce our mushrooms as well as organic, food grade ethanol for extraction. We perform third-party testing on our extracts for heavy metals, pesticides, toxins, and potency to provide the highest quality extracts on the market. The mushroom extract industry is a bit like the “Wild Wild West”, and Gulf Spore is setting industry standards through our policies on full transparency…
but we aren’t stopping there.
As a biotech company centered around the potential of mushrooms, Gulf Spore aims to utilize mushroom extracts as novel solutions to the world’s leading problems. We have been awarded a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant by the National Science Foundation to utilize our mushrooms extracts in the food engineering sector. We are thrilled to act as the bond between science and nature to harness the power of functional mushrooms and help overcome one of our greatest challenges: food insecurity.
Meet the Founder
Gulf Spore was launched in 2023 by Dr. Brandi Brown, a bioengineer who fell in love with mushrooms. More than 54 million Americans are food insecure due to a lack of consistent access to nutritious food. At least 1 in 4 children are food insecure in the United States. As a mother, disabled military veteran, and someone who was food insecure as a child, Dr. Brandi Brown was motivated by these metrics to leave academia and build a company devoted to confronting this food crisis. After serving as an officer in the United States Air Force, Dr. Brown also desired to continue serving her country and realized her unique set of skills could be applied to fight a different war: the war against food insecurity. She founded Gulf Spore, with the vision of harnessing the power of mushrooms to help solve one of the greatest challenges in human history: feeding 10 billion people.
Sustainability
Care about our planet? Mushrooms are considered to be one of the most sustainable foods to produce! Our team at Gulf Spore is committed to sustainable practices. One could say there’s no cap on our sustainability goals…did you catch that mushroom pun? In other words, we don’t have loose “morels”. We use organic and non-GMO raw materials, upcycle our spent substrate to local farmers, optimize our energy usage, and never use pesticides on our mushrooms! However, one of the downsides to indoor mushroom farming is plastic usage currently, since mushrooms are commonly produced in custom-made plastic bags with special filter patches designed for the mushroom industry. Although alternatives have been demonstrated on smaller scales, such as growing mushrooms from buckets, there are challenges with running larger-scale operations in terms of time and revenue. But do not fear. Leaving this problem for others to solve would be spore taste, and Gulf Spore intends to be amongst the top innovators who help solve this plastic dilemma!
