Despite being featured heavily in television cooking shows and becoming a more common sight in retail outlets, exotic mushroom varieties are losing market share to
the growth of white button mushrooms in Australia.
That doesn’t mean the exotic mushroom category isn’t still growing, simply that it is being outstripped by the expansion of white button sales, according to the Australian Mushroom Growers’ Association’s general manager Greg Seymour.
“In terms of market share, we’ve seen a decline,” he told Fruitnet.com. “That might seem strange, because you can see them all over the place, but the reality is that the white market is growing much faster. There are more exotics around, but they have a smaller market share.”
One potential stumbling block is the origin – most exotic varieties are imported from Asia, putting pressure on the shelf life of the perishable product.
A small amount of local production has been developing in recent years of varieties like shiitake, enoki, oyster mushrooms and black fungus or wood ear.
Growth in Australia’s white button market has been sitting at somewhere between 5 and 8 per cent annually for a number of years, according to different industry estimates.
