‘My Strategy: Be First, Be Flexible, Build Relationships — and Keep Overhead Low ’

Story By: Brad Dunn August 2023 Re Mind Media

Tori Armbrust is founder of Satori Farms PDX, the first company to receive a license to manufacture psilocybin mushrooms in Oregon. A long-time mushroom enthusiast, cultivator, and educator, she is currently working with many of the new service centers opening under the rollout of Measure 109 by the Oregon Psilocybin Services Section.

Armbrust recently shared some of her strategies in launching her one-person business, the challenges she’s facing with lab testing and packaging, and what her ultimate goals are in this rapidly emerging industry.

How did mushrooms and mushroom cultivation come into your life? 

It all started, gosh, almost a decade ago. We were camping and ran across some chanterelles with a friend of ours who had foraged before. I just thought it was the coolest thing. So we foraged a lot over the next couple months, then the season ended, and I really wanted to continue having these mushrooms in my world. So that led to cultivation. I knew somebody who had done BRF (brown rice flour) cakes, so he showed me a little of what was involved. From there I just took off with it. I'm entirely self-taught. I'm not a mycologist, I don't come from the scientific aspect of it. I really just come from having grown mushrooms in every different way possible. I also learned to keep it really low tech, spending a minimal amount of money, minimal time and space.

With the chanterelles, was the fun more in discovering them or the actual collecting and eating them? 

Oh, every part of it. Mushrooms were never really part of my world at all, which is coincidental because I later learned that my grandmother was incredibly into mushrooms. She comes from Lithuania, and she told me stories about getting lost in Lithuania trying to mushroom hunt. I didn’t know mushrooms were such a big part of our family until I had connected with them myself. 

But everything about them just drew me in. I also really liked that people have all this fear of mushrooms. Not just that they can be poisonous, but some people don't even want to touch them. They think you can die from just touching them. There's so many myths. So I think I've always wanted to find, like we all do, something that is unique and really resonates with me and fits who I am. And mushrooms do that. 

So as a cultivator, what drew you to starting a psilocybin mushroom business, instead of, say, selling gourmet mushrooms at farmers’ markets?

I think just the incredible uniqueness of this opportunity. I mean I love cultivation, but I also have a massive drive to get things done. Becoming the first person to be licensed for psilocybin mushroom cultivation was a huge motivation for me. Also, I’ve always wanted to work for myself. So this was just an enormous opportunity, and I couldn't not go for it. 

Of course, it’s a big risk. It’s scary. I still don't know if it's going to work out. I’ve put everything I have in this, my entire life savings. There's no one backing me, there are no investors. So it's really scary. But I also wanted to do something that is historical. I wanted to show my kids that you should follow your dreams. This was just too perfect to pass up. There's no way I could have lived with the regret of not having tried it. 

You filed your license application on Jan. 2, 2023, the first day Oregon began accepting them. How was the licensing process?

Overall, it was fairly straightforward, especially if you were willing to dig into the pages and pages of regulations. The biggest hurdle I was able to overcome, and a lot of people weren't, was finding a commercial space with the right zoning and in the right jurisdiction. That was huge, and I secured the lease just two days before I applied. After OHA (Oregon Health Authority) reviewed my application, they came and did a site visit. I definitely made some errors in the application and had to resubmit some stuff. But even so, I’m glad I pushed to be the first to go through the process. A lot of people felt they should wait and see how things went before they applied. But it was important to me to make things happen, and not just wait and ride in on the efforts of others. So I jumped in and took the risk, because that’s where all the reward is.

How much did you have to renovate to turn the space into a cultivation facility? Was that the most expensive part of your startup costs?
No, not at all. Ultimately my goal has always been to operate with incredibly low overhead. So I found the cheapest space I could that lived up to the regulations. Essentially, it’s an old office building that’s honestly not in a very safe area. So I went beyond the security-system requirements and barred up the windows. I’m also using a lot of low tech — this is not some shiny, stainless steel lab. I’m using the equipment from my house that I’ve always used because I know I’ll have success with it. I’m still using grain jars and growing in tubs. Some of my competitors who have investors are building out these huge facilities. But my strategy has always been to keep overhead low, move into the market as fast as possible, be flexible, and build early relationships with the service centers as they come online.

How many have come online so far? And how many of those are you now working with?

Five service centers have been licensed at this point, and I’m selling mushrooms to all five. 

What varieties are you cultivating? What’s most in demand?

A lot of the centers — kind of like in the black market — are looking for the popular ones: Penis Envy, Pink Buffalo, Golden Teacher. But every center wants something different, so I'm trying to have a lot of options available. Right now, I have a good inventory of probably 10 to 15 different varieties. It's really hard to predict what they’ll want, because the service centers are starting to work with different facilitators who have their own preferences, too. So I'm really trying to keep it super open, because I have the time and flexibility right now. 

Being first to market also means you’re first to set prices. How did you approach this? 

Well, I saw my competitors were going to be all over the map on this. Some indicated they’d be pricing a single max dose at $200. Some more, some less. I decided to start low, like $125 per max dose. Not only to stay competitive, but also because there’s been so much press about how incredibly expensive the service centers are going to be. Some are charging $3,500 for a max dose session. I think the lowest I've heard of is maybe $2,000. I've heard other cultivators complain that the centers are getting such a huge portion of this for their services, and we're only getting a tiny bit for the product. I absolutely hate that perspective, because the only way we're going to make this sustainable is if we keep our prices low. Because I have low costs, I can be sustainable with low pricing. Eventually all these costs need to come down. There are a ton of people who can’t afford a $1,000 session, let alone $3,500. 

Do you think those people will make the gray market for psilocybin grow?

Maybe, but I think there are many, many people who would never buy illegally. And that’s who our entire industry is here to serve. You know, as soon as I got my license and my name was published, I started getting maybe three calls a day from people who were in dire need. One person had just found out they had kidney cancer, another wanted to kill themselves, people in very fragile states. They couldn’t afford the service centers. They thought they could buy shrooms directly from me, because there hasn’t been a lot of public education about this. I’ve had to explain over and over again that I can’t sell direct. There’s absolutely no wiggle room. It’s heartbreaking. I tell them I’m under a microscope and will get shut down in a second. So much of a microscope that sometimes I wonder if the person with the sad story is undercover and just testing me. So that’s been very hard. 

I can only imagine. That’s probably not something you anticipated when you opened up.

Not at all. And it just shows how important this whole industry is, how much people need this. We need to get it right, and we need to get prices down as soon as possible.

So back to pricing and the product itself. What is a single max dose? And how does the testing process work?

It’s 50mg of psilocybin. Which as a cultivator is tricky, because different mushroom varieties have different potencies. With some, you can get 50mg out of 2.5g of dried shrooms. With others, you need like 7g. Which makes the testing and packaging process fairly maddening. 

Honestly, testing is one of the big issues the industry has to deal with right now. I’ve been doing duplicate testing on the same batches at two different labs. One uses a methanol process, the other uses ethanol. The results are always different. OHA hasn’t standardized this, and right now there are no checks and balances between the two methods. Also, the whole process is arbitrary, because each lab takes a representative test batch. You bring in a whole bag of shrooms and they pick out a random 2% of them to test. But every mushroom can be totally different even within the same flush. So, while this is obviously a whole new industry, we really need to figure out how to standardize testing.

Are you concerned that ultimately the problem is too complicated and the state will decide to move to synthetic psilocybin, which is easier to dose?

Well, I think it's inevitable. People believe there's big money to be made in this, and just like we did with cannabis and extracts, I think people are going to want to concentrate it and make it more shelf stable. But I’ll always believe in the natural mushroom. I'm really upfront about that. There are so many other important compounds beside psilocybin in it — like baeocystin and norbaeocystin, which I think are important. I actually think the customers or their facilitators should grind them up themselves as part of the process. You know, just have some connection with the mushroom before you consume it. 

But, of course I am pretty anti-pharmaceuticals — and anti-government, for that matter, because of all the regulations. I know OHA is under intense scrutiny to get this right, and I respect that. But it’s also been challenging to insert myself into a government attitude about this. I feel like being above ground is riskier than being underground because you have a lot to lose if you don't do exactly what the government wants. And what they want is to tightly control something that just happens and grows in nature. 

OK, last question: Do you have a main goal for your first year in business, or a specific target in terms of revenue or number of clients or something else you’re aiming for?

At this point, all I’m hoping is that I can pay next year's $10,000 license fee. I don't know if there will be profit, because the manufacturer market might get too saturated. But I'm also hoping that because of my early-on press and my effort to establish good honest relationships with people will help me stay in the game for a while. I really appreciate that this has been part of my life. I love it. I'm not in it for the money, just to create a sustainable business and make a living for myself and my family. 

As far as big-picture goals, I actually hope that maybe in 5 or 10 years my business doesn't even exist in this capacity because it's all been legalized. That’s the real goal: Not needing to exist anymore. Which is not great if you’re trying to build a long-term business, obviously. But I’m trying to build more like a bridge to get us to a new place after so many years of the War on Drugs. For me, it's about changing the stigma and hopefully being part of something that can have a real positive impact on people’s lives.