With the slogan ‘Urban. Sustainable. Organic mushrooms straight from your city’, the Cologne-based start-up Pilzling welcomes visitors to its website and invites them to buy directly or use the online shop. The founding team's mission is ambitious and involves revolutionising urban agriculture and sustainable food production. The company is using EU funding to develop and install a state-of-the-art monitoring and control system, which the NRW.Europa team was able to help acquire.

While plants use photosynthesis to obtain energy from sunlight, fungi obtain their nutrients by breaking down organic matter. This fundamental distinction not only sets them apart from ordinary plants, but also allows them to thrive on a variety of substrates. This speciality makes them an ideal crop for sustainable agricultural practices. ‘For the most complete circular economy possible, we turn by-products of urban life such as coffee grounds, wood shavings and spent grains into high-quality protein sources as a nutrient base for our mushrooms. What is left over after the mushrooms have grown is given to us as compost,’ explains Managing Director and founder Christian Vetter.

Co-founder Trevor Weiss also emphasises how important the topic is to the start-up: ‘We want to incorporate many forms of the circular economy into our business model and maintain close contacts with other urban producers in order to use their by-products as nutrients for our mushrooms.’

Support from the NRW.Europa team
The company founders approached ZENIT in 2023 in search of funding for a state-of-the-art monitoring and control system. The NRW.Europa funding team quickly identified a suitable European cascade funding programme that supports projects in the field of urban agriculture. The funding team accompanied the Cologne-based company through the entire application process. In a series of counselling sessions, they explained how the EU cascade funding mechanism works, helped Pilzling decide which of the funding lines to apply for and gave tips on preparing the application in advance. In order to optimise the final version before it was submitted, feedback was also given on the draft application. The result was a positive funding decision for 20,000 euros in the SUAVE Lump Sum Innovation programme. In the same programme, a further 5,000 euros were raised for consulting services.

‘Thanks to the funding, we can automate and optimise several aspects of the mushroom cultivation process, which strengthens our competitiveness and contributes to the sustainability of the region around Cologne,’ say Pilzling Managing Director and founder Christian Vetter (pictured right) and co-founder Trevor Weiss.

Contact the NRW.Europa team:
Marcus Collier-Wright
ZENIT GmbH / Enterprise Europe Network
for North Rhine-Westphalia NRW.Europa
Telephone: 0208 30004-54
email: Marcus.Collier-Wright@zenit.eu
Latest news on Cascade Funding: https://nrweuropa.de/cascadefunding/

Contact to the company:
I.M.A. Pilzling GmbH, Cologne

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