SISTER ACT

Two food-obsessed sisters have turned a mission to create exciting meat-free meals into a thriving mushroom business

- WORDS RHODA PARRY PHOTOGRAPHS ANDREW MONTGOMERY

It's early autumn at the 300-year-old flint barn, overlooking the River Adur in West Sussex.

This is HQ of the award-winning mushroom business Caley Brothers – run not by brothers, but by sisters Jodie Bryan and Lorraine Caley. A table is loaded with out-of-this-world gourmet mushrooms – king oyster, yellow oyster, pink oyster, lion’s mane – all being cut and prepped for local restaurants’ seasonal menus. One of the king oyster mushrooms weighs in at a whopping 680g. “By growing them at home, you get monumental oysters,” says Lorraine.

What the sisters call their ‘mush love’ began in 2018, when they started considering plant-orientated diets. Their father was sadly ill with cancer, and with six young children between them, the sisters were trying to move away from meat-based meals. “We’re big foodies,” says Jodie. “There were exciting recipes using shiitake, oyster and lion’s mane, but we couldn’t buy them easily in supermarkets. The portobello and button mushrooms they could find weren’t really hitting the spot. “We wanted to find an alternative that would hold the plate like meat tends to,” says Lorraine.

Inspired by an innovative social enterprise, GroCycle, which offers guides on how to cultivate mushrooms, the sisters decided to give growing their own a try. Jodie worked in hospitality and had contact with café owners. Before they knew it, they were collecting coffee grounds and buying spores (the microscopic reproductive cell of fungi, essentially the seed) to grow their first indoor harvest. “It felt like we were meant to do it,” says Jodie. “What people don’t realise is that mushrooms grow quickly. So when you start growing, you grow a lot.”