Mushroom Value Chain and Role of Value Addition

Mushrooms are nutritious, medicinal and functional food. It contains low calories, high protein, dietary fiber, vitamins, and minerals. It is very promising in its agribusiness trend, but has a constraint low shelf life. Mushroom value chain is classified into input suppliers, producers, traders, processors and consumers. Spawn suppliers played the major role in the distribution of inputs, collection and marketing of the produce. The produce has to be modified to more durable products, thus adding value to mushroom. Women empowerment and lack of time for cooking also increased demand for convenient products of mushrooms. In India value addition of mushroom represents approximately 7% which is lower than some developing countries. Hence there is a need to improve the value chain system and increase value addition. Many novel value-added products can be prepared with mushrooms like soup powder, pickles, chips, paste, ketchup, noodles, pasta, biscuits, nuggets. Received: Dec 28, 2018; Accepted: Jan 18, 2019; Published: Feb 01, 2019; Paper Id.: IJBRJUN20192 O riinal A ricle International Journal of Botany and Research (IJBR) ISSN (P): 2277-4815; ISSN (E): 2319-4456 Vol. 9, Issue 1, Jun 2019, 5-14 © TJPRC Pvt. Ltd.