Our products

Even though the white mushroom, cultivated industrially, is a usual presence on the tables, wild mushrooms are also highly prized in France: porcini and other boletus members of the boletus family, chanterelles, black trumpets, wood hedgehogs...

The consumed species vary according to the culinary habits of the different French regions: in effect wild mushrooms amount to several thousand species (about 70,000), and barely twenty or so is marketed in France.

Mushrooms are an element important to biodiversity, it comes in second place after the insects with respect to the number of species. Many of them host a rich fauna of mycetophagous insects, which are another key element in the specific biodiversity of the woodland. On ground level their mycelia serve as an essential food source for microorganisms: bacteria, nematodes, insects, worms... Mushrooms also serve as nourishment for mammals (deers, boars, squirrels and small rodents), slugs and snails, and also for many insects (flies, ants...). The dispersal of spores, which were not altered by digestion, is therefore assured by evacuation of the gut contents.

The collecting, which is organized on a national basis, can hardly satisfy the demand, and that is why France imports mushrooms. This import is estimated by the professionals to 5,000 tons during a normal year but the commercial volumes are probably twice as high because of direct sales.

Over the last fifteen years, the commercial harvesting of wild mushrooms has become an organized industry, mainly in European and North American countries. Girels are mostly imported from Eastern Europe (Russia, Poland, Romania...) but also from North America (USA and Canada), the Iberian peninsula (Spain and Portugal), or even North Africa (Morocco, Tunisia...)