Just One Thing Interview: FungALL – turning waste into healthy food for local communities

This Just One Thing Interview was conducted and written by Ellie Eckersley 

Norton is the founder of FungALL, and doesn’t consider himself to be a traditional entrepreneur, not driven by conventional business rapid growth models, but by social purpose. Instead, FungALL creatively work to solve the problem of growing mushrooms from food waste partners, for example, most recently waste from local breweries, that are made into healthy meals to serve local communities. Norton takes an approach of building practical responses to food insecurity and waste, ultimately asking “how can we turn waste into food? And how can we do that together, as communities?”

From speculative art project to serving local people 

Norton started the project as an experimentation during his degree in Fine Arts, considering speculative futures of the Anthropocene and the ability to sustainably continue to produce food from waste, imagining what systems might be possible and necessary in 50 years’ time, “or to put that more simply, imaginations or assumptions about what might exist or need to exist in the future.”  

This is something that is particularly important in response to environmental breakdown and food system collapse. This project involved imagining the possibility of a mushroom company operating, but through creating this, Norton realised it is something he could do, deciding to test if these concepts of imagined future were already possible. 

This involved transforming his bedroom into a DIY mushroom laboratory, to test whether this is something that could be created and reproduced on larger scales. The one rule that he stuck by no specialist equipment unless it could be improvised from repurposed materials. 

“It had to be built from waste,” he explained. “If this was about resilience it couldn’t rely on expensive kit.” 

He successfully showed how household and organic waste streams could be converted into edible mushrooms, proving that decentralised food production was viable at a small scale and something that could similarly be scaled up. 

Evolving science and experimentation 

While FungALL originally emerged from an art context, it is increasingly applying science and experimentation, something Norton is highly motivated by – particularly around substrate development and scalable systems. 

This is clear in a recent project they started funding for a brewery waste project focusing on spent brewers’ grain, a byproduct of beer production. Norton explains, “brewers’ grain is abundant and easy to source at scale. The challenge is processing it into a viable mushroom substrate.” 

Unlike coffee waste, which proved logistically difficult to manage consistently at scale, brewery waste is produced within hundreds of kilograms weekly from a single source, meeting both necessary volume and reliability to achieve their purpose of creating and stable cultivation systems, that local people can benefit from. 

Norton explained that he will soon begin a part-time master’s degree to support this development, focusing on business development, scalability and hyper-local community food production models, the goal of which is not industrial expansion, but replicable, community-embedded systems. 

Collaboration and working with the local community 

FungALL aims to collaborate with local groups and individuals with the purpose of social inclusion, through the intersection of food, education and social inclusion. To do this, they collaborate with: 

Part of this partnership work revolved around workshops where participants can learn on hand cultivation techniques from and are involved in product development and processing. 

Future plans for FungALL include registering with the AQA Awarding Body to offer certification and launching a FungALL School of Mycology this year. A proposed certificate in Mycology and Community Food Production would formalise the educational pathway Norton has been building informally for years. 

The practical future focused food model 

FungALL utilise organic waste streams currently include coffee grounds and, increasingly, brewery waste. The harvested mushrooms are then distributed freely through community fridges, food banks and weekly shared lunches. 

“Everything we grow is free at the moment,” Norton says. “It’s about access.” 

Norton reflected on the significance of long-term sustainability and discussed the possibility of the organisation trialling a £1-per-meal contribution model. But accessibility remains the priority. 

Now approaching its third year, FungALL looks different from Norton’s early expectations. “I thought we’d expand rapidly with multiple farms across the North,” he reflected. “But innovation and experimentation move slowly.” 

Today, FungALL operates two farms and a small community lab, supported by a small and committed team. Thousands of people have been fed and educated through workshops and shared meals and they are continuing the develop their current projects responding to specific community needs, including: 

The aim isn’t only food production but social infrastructure, exploring an ethical, community-franchisable model that allows replication without becoming extractive. Norton’s further academic research, potentially wanting to complete a PhD within this field in future, will examine scalability and policy integration while maintaining the significance of community control.