The Basics of Growing
Our Goals
Giorgio's employees work diligently to keep America’s food supply robust with healthy, nutritious mushrooms and high quality, sustainable food packaging. Our goals are to be the preferred partner for our customers, the employer of choice to our team members and a responsible corporate citizen to our neighbors and to the planet.
Growing Giorgio Mushrooms
We start our growing process by creating a fully organic compost from agricultural products in a semi-enclosed system, providing our five farms with a nutritious substrate on which to grow our mushroom crops. These natural ingredients include hay, corn fodder, bedded straw, poultry, and corn cobs. Additionally, we use hardwood leaves from local municipalities in our compost. We have been using leaves in the fall as a carbon source for over 35 years, and we are the only mushroom farm in the world to provide this service to communities.
We complete our composting process indoors in our high-tech, tunnel facility where computer control assures optimization of compost pasteurization and productivity. The compost delivered to our farms is naturally selective for growing just the mushrooms we sell.
Giorgio controls all growing processes with detailed written standards, assuring that our high quality crops are always repeatable. These standards are based on the very best mushroom science and research available in biology, physics, and chemistry, as well as 95 years of experience producing our crops. Our standards cover every aspect of the multifaceted mushroom growing process from compost formulation to the use of compost removed from our facilities when crops are completed.
We operate a state-of-the-art, metal shelved, Dutch growing facility that optimizes process control and harvesting efficiency. This is our model for future expansion to meet our customers’ increased demand for Giorgio products.
Giorgio is a Certified Integrated Pest Management Farm
Giorgio is an agricultural industry leader in Integrated Pest Management. The Giorgio growing staff wrote and edited most of The Penn State University Mushroom Integrated Pest Management Handbook. Our comprehensive IPM program, from composting to post crop, includes pest and disease monitoring, exclusion, pesticide application thresholds, resistance management, and biological pest control products. Our IPM program has been certified by Penn State and the University of Delaware.
Giorgio Values Employees as Our Most Important Resource
We work together as a team in our family owned and operated company, while providing our team members with fair wages, benefits, and opportunities for advancement. We have a comprehensive code of ethics and a fully integrated workplace health and safety program. We encourage our employees to produce fact-based, creative thinking and collaboration towards developing new products and driving continuous improvement.
Giorgio and Food Safety
Giorgio employees achieve and uphold the highest industry standards of quality, food safety and wholesomeness to meet and exceed our customers’ expectations. Giorgio has SQF and Kosher certification. In addition, our growing and packing facilities are GFSI and Global GAP certified. We focus daily attention to our HACCP program and ensure all our operations and processes are in accordance with Food Safe practices and legislative requirements.
Giorgio Supplies Organic Mushrooms to Meet Customer Needs
Our organic mushrooms have nothing to hide, and we are proud to meet the highest standards of the National Organic Program of the United States Department of Agriculture and our organic certifiers.