Maxime Boniface, you are co-founder, with Hamid Sailani, of Champiloop in 2020. Describe your company to us.
It is a solidarity company of social utility which rehabilitates disused places into mushroom farms. Today, we operate the Friesian cellars, which are an old icehouse that was created in the 19th century, in which beer was stored because it is naturally cool, humid and very well insulated. And since 2016, it is a mushroom farm where we produce oyster mushrooms and shiitake, mushrooms of Asian origin
This first mushroom farm is located where?
It’s in Eybens, not far from the Château de la Commanderie. We market exclusively in a short circuit and our products are highly appreciated for their freshness and quality. So we mainly work with restaurants. We have stars like Aribert, in Saint-Martin-d’Uriage or Fantin Latour, in Grenoble. We also have restaurants that work with local products, grocery stores like “La bonne pioche” or even, recently, Leclerc in Saint-Martin-d’Hères. As a result, we are going to open a second mushroom farm in Saint-Martin-d’Hères, in the Renaudie district.
And for that, you are going to rehabilitate a disused car park?
In fact, we responded jointly with the city of Saint-Martin-d’Hères and the metropolis of Grenoble to a call for projects from the National Agency for Urban Renewal, which wanted to use urban agriculture as a lever for revitalizing neighborhoods. So there was this six-year-old parking lot, 1,000 square meters, which was unused. We, we proposed the project to make a mushroom farm. We were awarded and we launched the construction site a month ago for an opening scheduled for February 2023.
But is a parking lot suitable for being a mushroom farm?
It’s semi-buried, so it’s well partitioned. It is relatively cool, humid all year round. We are going to install a lot of insulation and ventilation there to create the optimal conditions for the production of mushroom substrates and the mushrooms themselves.
How many of you work at Champiloop?
We are two partners and we employ three employees on a work-study basis.
Do you do reintegration through work?
This is the project. We will be able to create three or four jobs in the years to come by increasing our production. There, we are about 700 kilos per month. We will have production capacity to produce three tons of mushrooms per month. Indeed, there will be work for the production of substrates, for the harvest of mushrooms, for deliveries. And the objective is to open up these jobs to the inhabitants of the Renaudie district, in Saint-Martin-d’Hères, in which we are therefore opening our second mushroom farm.