Behind that stream of steaming hot coffee pouring into your cup is a waste stream of coffee grounds. Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez of Back to the Roots (BTTR) view the huge amounts of coffee grounds waste coming out of coffee shops as a huge potential for urban mushroom farming. The UC Berkeley students were in their final semester with corporate job offers in hand when they heard about growing gourmet mushrooms from coffee grounds and independently reached out to their professor for more information. (Read a Q&A with Arora after the jump.)

The professor put them in touch and they got to growing their business idea. They asked Peet’s Coffee for used coffee grounds and set up ten test buckets in Velez’s fraternity kitchen to try out mushroom farming. Only one bucket grew a crop of mushrooms.

They took the single success to a famous Berkeley restaurant, Chez Panisse, to get those mushrooms checked out–they were sautéed and deemed good. (If you’re wondering, mushrooms grown in coffee grounds do not pick up a coffee kick to their flavor.) The two budding entrepreneurs took the same bucket to Whole Foods and caught the interest of store employees. Their idea also caught the interest of their university, which awarded them a $5K social innovation grant.

What’s happened since those early days is remarkable. In six months, the mushroom growing venture went from having product distributed in one Whole Foods to national distribution. Last year Planet Green reported that BTTR became “the sole oyster mushroom supplier to the entire North California region of Whole Foods while transforming over 10,000 pounds of coffee ground waste per week from Peet’s Coffee.”

Peet’s, which sold BTTR’s mushroom growing kits in its shops, proudly proclaims that it is the primary source of BTTR’s coffee grounds, and plans to give them 1 million pounds of grounds to reuse this year. Whole Foods also sells the grow kits and provided the venture with a low-interest loan for local producers.

But that’s not all. When these two urban mushroom farmers put up an ad on Craigslist to get rid of their spent coffee grounds with broken mushroom roots, they discovered a market for their own waste stream. The mushrooms enrich the grounds as they grow leaving behind a desirable alternative to chemical fertilizer. It sells as a premium soil amendment.

The White House recently highlighted BTTR as a “Champion of Change” for its sustainable business model. Keep reading to find out more about what Nikhil Arora has to say about growing and eating mushrooms.

As a recent college grad, why did you give up the security of a post-college job offer to become an urban mushroom farmer? Did you ever have any doubts about your choice?

After Alex and I first came across this idea in a class, it was a very step-by-step process our last semester. We brainstormed, ended up growing one test bucket of mushrooms on coffee grounds, had a local restaurant try them and like them, got some initial interest from WF [Whole Foods], a $5k grant from our [university's] Chancellor–and by that time, with all that support building up from our community we looked at each other sand said “we have got to do this!”

We started seeing the potential for turning waste into food and local jobs and wanted to run with it. The first months were some of the toughest, and there were many days where we would look at each other, knee-deep in coffee grounds, and ask “what are we doing??”–but the friendship that Alex and I developed early on was crucial to carrying us through those early tough days.

The grow kits look way more fun than the Chia Pet I got as a kid, with the major benefit of producing edible mushrooms. Are the kits primarily for educational/entertainment value? Or can the home kits also compete against other mushrooms sold in stores when it comes to taste and price?

The kits are definitely a ton of fun (grow up to 1.5 in as little as 10 days) …by far the most fast growing food out there! However, the nice thing is they also compare on price–and that’s something we really work for because we know for this grow-your-own movement to really take off, it can’t just be a one-off fad/one-time purchase. These mushrooms go for around $12 lbs in many stores, so there’s that price parity right away, but the neat thing is that we actually sell replacement bags & offer a monthly mushroom club online–so those who really want to grow their own food can continue to do so (keep the box/mister) and save money!

What’s your favorite dish featuring mushrooms? Do you eat more of them today than before you started urban mushroom farming?

My favorite dish has to be the mushroom tacos our warehouse manager Osvaldo cooks up–they are absolutely delicious! Definitely eating a lot more mushrooms now than before–have a much greater appreciation for them!  

What are three things that people can do to build an innovative and sustainable business idea into a successful reality?

1) Focus–especially early on, pick one thing (a product, a service, etc) and work endlessly to become the very best at that one thing, however niche. We learned that lesson the hard-way early on when we were pursuing a handful of different products/services related to this concept, and not focusing on entirety on one..it almost put us out of business.

2) Build partnerships–it takes a village to build a company. Do not underestimate the power of partnerships–find unique partners who can take your brand to the next level, find creative ways to offer them value-add as well from supporting you so they become fully invested in your future, and leverage their networks and communities. Always look to make every partnership a two-way street so you grow together!

3) It’s all about the team! No matter how great an idea is, you cannot build a successful company without an all-star team. It’s not the product or idea that has helped grow Back to the Roots–but an unbelievable team (family, more so!) that all believes in our mission & vision and is willing to work hard & innovate to achieve our goals.

Media reports included coverage of the downward effect of Rajaratnam’s recent arrest on the Colombo Stock Exchange in Sri Lanka, where “even rumors of his trades can send the stock market up or down” and transcripts from wiretaps of the illegal conversations at issue. But “Desi vs. Desi” brings up another interesting angle on the story about the case’s prosecution. The recently appointed U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York who will be prosecuting the case against Rajaratnam is also desi. Preet Bharara, formerly the chief counsel to Senator Chuck Schumer, oversees hundreds of lawyers and high-profile cases, including the ongoing fraud case against Bernie Madoff. He’s been billed as The New Wall Street Nightmare.

Does Bharara being brown like the defendants complicate matters? Before you dismiss the question as silly or irrelevant, consider the comments from a couple of legal experts.

Sonjui L. Kumar, president of the North American South Asian Bar Assocation, says that Bharara “has to walk as fine a line as there is.” “White prosecutors arrest people all the time, but here you have this financial mogul who happens to be South Asian and then you have a South Asian attorney.” (WSJ)

New York-based defense attorney Ravi Batra was a bit more explicit.

“When you are rising in the mainstream, you have to prove that you’re not parochial or ethnic.” He drew a comparison to another instance of a top prosecutor leading the charge against criminal activity by individuals of the same ethnic background. “What former Manhattan U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani did to the mob is what Preet Bharara will do to Wall Street.” (WSJ)

The implication appears to be that Bharara should guard against any perception that he’s going easy on another desi. On the flip side, I wonder if guarding against that perception might lead him to move more aggressively against the desis faced with insider trading charges. Given popular support for tackling this kind of white collar crime I guess the latter possibility isn’t one that many of us would be too concerned about, but the issue of whether/how perceived bias becomes an issue in brown-on-brown courtroom dramas is intriguing and I don’t recall any episodes of Law & Order exploring this!

What do you think, readers and legal eagles? Does Bharara have something extra to prove in this high-profile case given the desi defendants? Or will this commonality be a non-issue as he pursues charges against all the defendants, desi and otherwise?

The first thing on my list: MTV Iggy’s special feature on Bollywood’s “new wave” of filmmakers. The idea is that, much like the French new wave of the 50s, Indian cinema is facing a radical change, with auteur directors leading the way with a new influx of talent, money, professionalism and creativity. And the audience in India is ready for it. Anuvab Pal (friend of Sepia alum Manish Vij) is now a screenwriter in Mumbai, and his funny, engaging, and very revealing article is a must read:

In fall 2003, I was asked by a friend of mine, the director Manish Acharya, to co-write a film with him. It would be about a Bollywood singing contest in New Jersey. We were influenced by the movies of Christopher Guest and Woody Allen, and had lived in New York for a numbers of years. At some point, in various coffee shops in Manhattan, as we wrote, I asked Manish who our audience might be. He intelligently remarked that we shouldn’t write with audiences in mind but just try to tell a good story. That’s the sort of answer auteur film directors give at film festival Q&As and grave audiences nod in agreement. It had a sort of nobility to it. I was far more interested in a petty middle-class answer.

“Still, who?” I insisted.

“Whom” he corrected, adding, “New India. This is a film for new India.”

[snip]

…Somehow, somewhere, someone said enough. The fiefdoms of old-school studios churning out regressive family sagas, the cartel of stars making unreasonable demands like stretch limousines during foreign shoots, silly Hallmark Channel soap conflicts, cheesy glamour, lazy storytelling, laughable dialogue that made us ashamed on airplanes when we read them subtitled, and the clichés of Bollywood (boy meets girl, coy dancing around trees, gratuitous wet sari scenes)… all, in the last seven years, somehow ended.

[snip]

“The only producers from the earlier era who will survive are those who are trying to change. You need to bring in new writers and directors to make that happen” explained a studio executive at The Indian Film Company. “Look at Aamir Khan-he starred in terribly silly movies playing lovers in sailor hats. Today he’s India’s leading cutting-edge producer of the new wave. And look at Subhash Ghai. Once with the Midas touch, now critics say he’s lost the pulse of his audience.”

As a writer of alternative films in Bollywood, I see the studios’ daily struggle to be relevant as every Friday some new director releases a cult hit. I’ve been in script meetings for a Bollywood remake of Motorcycle Diaries, an adaptation of “half” a remake of Steve Martin’s Bowfinger, and I got offered a screenplay based on “a story about a murderer/singer/dancer in Paris”.

Clearly, producers are hungry for new material and simultaneously unsure of new ideas. Instinctually they recoil, but are worried the changing audience might think otherwise, so they second guess. “Today’s Bollywood is like the Jazz age America,” a magazine writer at Cine Blitz, India’s most popular film tabloid told me. “Everything is trendy, though no one knows the next trend”.

Into the middle of all this parachute-dropped Slumdog Millionaire, the global phenomenon which immediately made both old Bollywood and new Bollywood exhilarated and angry at the same time. Angry because new wave directors like Sudhir Mishra or Anurag Kashyap did similar (and arguably much better) films like Satya and Dharavi, on similar subjects — i.e. set in slums amongst Mumbai gangsters. Angry because no Hollywood studios swooped in with distribution deals that would have ensured a similar global (especially American) audience. Angry also because the term “poverty porn” was being thrown around as if India’s biggest cinematic export was its destitution. Exhilarated because Hollywood studios have flocked to India in the last few years, and Slumdog has cemented their stay.

Full article here. He’s a great writer, and the piece is interesting peek into an industry generally shrouded in mystery and wallpapered with winking/kowtowing celebrity profiles.

The feature also includes video interviews with directors like Anurag Kashyap (Dev D):

Anurag Kashyap: Bollywood = Stock Characters in La La Land
Anurag Kashyap

Rohan Sippy (Bluffmaster, producer of The President is Coming), Zoya Akhtar (Luck By Chance), actors like Naseeruddin Shah, slideshows, etc.

[full disclosure: I work for MTV Iggy and edited the feature. If you think it's stupid, now's your chance to tell me!]

A few days ago, I received a press announcement for a new line of luxury bottled water: B’eau Pal. (Oo la la!) But the fine print was a little less enticing:

The unique qualities of our water come from 25 years of slow-leaching toxins at the site of the world’s largest industrial accident. To this day, Dow Chemical — who bought Union Carbide — has refused to clean up and whole new generations are being poisoned.

An explanation? Suffice it to say that The Yes Men have been at it again. In 2004, one of the Yes Men impersonated a Dow spokesperson on BBC World TV and announced that the “company was finally going to compensate the victims and clean up Bhopal.” (We blogged about it here.) Immature? Perhaps. But it was remarkably satisfying to watch Dow, with its tail between its legs, distance themselves from this false announcement, which temporarily decreased Dow’s share price by two billion dollars.

Some of you may remember that stunt. Others of you, like me, may even be old enough to remember when Bhopal unfolded in December 1984. (And I’m young enough to have associated Indira Gandhi’s assassination earlier that year with trick-or-treating.) As Bhopal prepares to mark the 25th anniversary of this disaster, a recently released report by the Sambhavna Trust shows that

local groundwater, vegetables, and breast milk are contaminated by toxic quantities of nickel, chromium, mercury, lead, and volatile organic compounds. The report describes how a majority of children in one nearby community are born with serious medical problems traceable to the contamination. [source]

I’m trying to find a copy of the report, but in the meantime, find it worth mentioning that the Sambhavna Trust, composed of scientists, doctors, writers, and social workers, is working to “evolve simple, safe, effective, ethical and participatory ways of treatment monitoring and research for the survivors of Bhopal.” Part of this approach involves re-examining what in their words has been the dominant treatment of Bhopal victims so far– “the indiscriminate prescription of steroids, antibiotics and psychotropic drugs [that] is compounding the damage caused by the gas exposure.”[[source]](As the spawn of an Indian physician who emigrated to the United States in the late 1960s and as an antihistamine junkie, I cautiously agree that Sambhavna may have a point.)

Watch below as the Yes Men collaborate in their latest stunt with Bhopal activists, including Sathyu Sarangi (pictured above) from the Sambhavna Clinic, who attempt to offer random Londoners a taste of their toxic water before attempting to deliver it to Dow headquarters in London. (Dow doesn’t seem to be at home.)

Given that some younger people (at least in this video) have no memory of this disaster, I think that this PR gimmick is effective in raising awareness about both the disaster itself, and the fact that much, much more needs to be done. But what say the mutinous hordes?

So when I saw the images from Air India’s award-winning new campaign, I was a bit taken aback. I was used to the fusty maharaja, retro in a very unhip way, a character that was probably dated from its very inception. What was I to make of this mixed race family, desi female sitting openly in her white husband’s lap? (There’s another shot with a desi man, a white woman and a hadesi child)

The Maharaja was from an era of arranged marriages, when nobody spoke of dating, let alone across the colour line. I’ll bet he never looked once at a non-desi air hostess, no matter how flirtatious.

The new Air India, on the other hand, simply says “look, we’re just happy that you’re married and that you’ve given us a gorgeous grandkid! Now please visit more often.” (Yes, the campaign was created in India) It’s not really stylish, but it is most definitely contemporary. Maybe AI isn’t so dated after all. Now if only they could do something about their service, I’d really sit up and take notice.

UPDATE A few comments (thanks El Nino and Rishi ) have argued that these ads were designed just to win awards and haven’t (and wont) actually be used. People also pointed out that the idea is a straight lift from an earlier (proposed?) Air France campaign.

Banga comes to Mastercard from Citibank, where he had been in charge of their Asia-Pacific business and had been considered by the board for CEO before they turned to Pandit (one of the 20 worst CEOs EVAH!). Given that Citibank shares are down 85%, Banga must feel like he dodged a bullet by ending up at a smaller ($5 billion vs. $50 billion in revenues) but profitable company. While business is much harder for credit card companies than it used to be, Mastercard is just a middleman collecting fees by processing transactions and so it less likely to be affected than the banks and investors who hold now questionable credit card debt.

I’m also quite chuffed to see that a man in a turban and beard can phase through the corporate glass ceiling, especially in banking. In that respect, I think it helped that Banga’s career has been mainly international. In the US, minority executives and white executives follow different tracks (HBS study), but 14 years ago Banga was Marketing Director for Pepsi in India where he would not have been an outsider.

I saw my very first episode of Mad Men last night (while working on this post) and I found myself unable to empathise with the characters because I couldn’t relate to any of them. That was a world that I and most of my white friends (who are non-WASPs) would have been excluded from instantly, no matter what our credentials. Nor was this permeating predjudice limited to the 1950s: I heard Dershowitz recall that he couldn’t get a job at a top law firm in the mid-60s after clerking for the Supreme Court because he was Jewish!

So here’s to Ajay Banga and the others who will come after him, because a crack in the glass ceiling … is priceless.

While playing golf in Buenos Aires recently, R. Viswanathan, the Indian ambassador to Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay, had an interesting experience: the Argentinian players asked him where they could buy a turban and how to wear it. When the ambassador probed the reason for their interest, they pointed to a home within the country club complex and said:

‘Here lives an Indian maharaja. He looks handsome with his turban. When he goes to the night clubs, he gets premium service and gets it free because they think he is a maharaja.’

When Viswanathan tried to explain that turbans do not equal maharaja status, the Argentinians asked him to shut up and not reveal this secret at the night clubs.

Turns out the “maharaja” they were speaking of is Simmarpal Singh, the “peanut prince of Argentina,” an employee of Olam, a 5.6 – billion dollar NRI company and a leading global supply chain manager of agricultural products and food ingredients!

Singh cultivates 12,000 hectares of peanut farms and another 5000 hectares of soya and corn in Rio Cuarto area in Cordoba province, about one thousand kms from Buenos Aires. His target is to take his company Olam among Argentina´s top three peanut players in the next few years. When he came to Argentina in 2005, his company was 28th in ranking in peanuts and he has already made it as sixth this year.

Viswanathan’s story, which profiles Singh’s work, ran in various Indian papers, including the Hindustan Times Punjab and The Asian Age, this past week. It examines the farming industry in Argentina and its potential to assist agriculture in India which is going to face shortage of land and water in coming years. Read it in full here.

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That’s right – they used edible ink to print the casing in “henna patterns” and create the first ever “branded sausage.” I’m waiting for the UK government to start printing health warnings directly on foodstuffs that are bad for your heart such as “eating this weiner will make yours a little limper.”

I really hope Daljit Singh, the company proprietor, is married already because he has just earned the enmity of every desi bride around the world. If this campaign gets widespread airplay, what do you think most people will think of when they see a chubby brown hennaed calf peeking out from underneath a red lehnga?

You can see the video version directly on the company website.

This store is exactly as over the top and ridiculous as the name suggests. It’s the kind of place where one (White) salesman was dressed in a very handsome lime colored Chinese silk jacket while another (white again) had 3 sandalwood malas on one arm, several around his neck, and at least one on the other arm. Their list of books and other offerings is very left coast, the sort of thing I encountered regularly when I lived in the Bay Arya, but rarely see in skeptical, ironic NYC.

Soon after I entered, in the CD rack, I found Jaya Lakshmi’s “Jewel of Hari.” I love the blurb that introduces the album: Yoga! Mantras! Flamenco! Veils! It’s nearly a perfect listing of New Age clichés, it has everything except Zen, Native Americans and gnostic wisdom.

My favorite item on sale, however, was the image of Obama as transcendant being, his third eye of wisdom a glowing globe. You see, this way he’s both seer and seen, because instead of an eye, we have the world which is perceived by the eye …. no, I didn’t get it either but then I’m still working on one hand clapping so more advanced koans (and Cohens) are beyond my meager capacity.

Still, I know that somebody, somewhere has this up on their wall, perhaps garlanded and on an altar, and this thought provides me with an endless source of mirth.

p.s. apologies for the poor image quality, these were surreptitious cell phone shots, not photos from a real camera.

During a bad recession with spiralling unemployment, of course, any earlier caution we might have seen from politicians regarding protectionism is going to be in danger. Congressional politicians from both parties are increasingly turning to populist language to ensure their own political survival. And the easiest group to pick on politically in recent years, by both Republicans and Democrats, has been immigrants, since they can’t vote anyway.

As many readers may already be aware, the recent American economic stimulus bill contained explicit language concerning foreign workers in the U.S.:

The stimulus bill contained the Employ American Workers Act, which was sponsored by Sens. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) and Bernard Sanders (I-Vt.). They say that they are worried that laid-off Americans struggling to find work are being displaced by foreign junior investment analysts, computer programmers and corporate lawyers who accept a fraction of the pay commanded by Americans.

“This H-1B program is a sweetheart deal for employers, in many instances, to be able to gain cheap labor from abroad,” Sanders, the son of a Polish immigrant, said in a telephone interview. “Immigration made this country great. But ask those American laid-off workers if they want $40,000-a-year engineers from Russia or India taking the place of an American engineer who would earn $80,000 a year. I don’t think anyone is going to tell me with a straight face that they can’t find some of that American talent right here on the unemployment lines.” (link)

Actually, Senator Sanders, I’m perfectly happy to tell you, with a straight face, that American IT companies are deeply dependent on foreign workers, whose positions could not easily be filled by American counterparts. Also, I can assure you that are not thousands of unemployed American software engineers on unemployment because Indian and Russian engineers in the U.S. are getting paid $40,000. Indeed, I’m fairly sure that H-1B engineers from India are getting paid considerably more than $40,000 a year on average.

The clampdown on foreign workers is also occurring in financial institutions, especially those that are getting federal bailout money:

During the past several months, the largest banks in the United States have announced 100,000 job cuts, Sanders said. Those same banks, which are receiving $150 billion in a taxpayer-funded bailout package, requested visas for more than 21,800 foreign workers over the past six years for positions such as senior vice presidents, corporate lawyers and human resources specialists, Sanders said, citing an Associated Press review of visa applications that the banks filed with the Labor Department.

As the economy worsened last year and employees were laid off, the number of visas sought by the dozen banks in the AP analysis increased by nearly a third, from 3,258 in fiscal 2007 to 4,163 in fiscal 2008.

What do readers make of the growing drift towards protectionism in American political discourse? How do you feel about the “Employ American Workers Act”? Are there effective ways to counter protectionist thinking during a recession? And: have any of these changes affected you or someone you know personally?

As a side note, I have heard some talking heads on TV–I forget who–arguing that in fact one possibly effective way to counter the housing slump might actually be an increase in high-skilled immigration: highly skilled immigrants in well-paying jobs might eventually start buying up all those empty condos everywhere. But that seems like kind of a strange argument to make right now, since, really, it seems like no one is hiring.

Also see: this Forum thread on the Employ American Workers Act at Immigration Voice. And here is an earlier SM post of mine related to the plight of Indian H-1B workers.