Daily Archives: November 12, 2010
The Berkeley Wire: 11.12.10
Someone thinks the Bears can challenge number one Oregon [Business Insider]
BUSD board unanimously rejects charter school application [Daily Cal]
Flag raising starts new Veterans Day tradition at Cal [UC Berkeley NewsCenter]
Conduct hearing recommends no suspension for Cal junior [SFGate]
Photo: Kim Aronson/Berkeleyside Flickr pool.
The mystery of the olive, explained
The UC Botanical Gardens is holding a series of workshops this month that exhibit the wonders of the olive.
On Sunday, people can learn how to make soap from olive oil. On November 21, there will be lessons on how to brine olives.
According to Deepa Natarajanhe, Botanical Gardens’s program and tour coordinator, the two workshops are part of an effort to draw more people to the gardens which are located on Centennial Drive in Berkeley, above the football … Continue reading »
Caution advised: earthquake predictions go viral
If you follow Twitter for mentions of Berkeley like we do, you may have been startled yesterday to find this scary tweet: “36 HOUR EARTHQUAKE WARNING; 5.0 to 6.0 earthquake likely in the Berkeley, Oakland area Nov 11-12″.
With updates every few hours, this all caps alert has been retweeted dozens of times. What none of the retweets mention, however, is that the origin of the tweets, the serious-sounding QuakePrediction.com, is a confection of pseudoscience and should be … Continue reading »
The Mushroom Guys: A Business out of UC Berkeley
There’s so much buzz around the fledgling food business launched last year by two former UC Berkeley students, you’d think they were pumping out premium honey.
BTTR Ventures, run by Haas School of Business graduates Nikhil Arora and Alejandro (Alex) Velez, has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, and on the BBC.
Launched on Earth Day last year, the company has won a steady stream of awards for its innovative, socially conscious, green business.
The pair, both 23, were named among America’s most promising social entrepreneurs by Business Week this year and in the top 25 young entrepreneurs by the same publication last year.
So, what are they doing? Well, they’re in the mushroom business: using recycled coffee grounds (from Peet’s Coffee & Tea), they produce spore starter kits so people can grow their own oyster mushrooms at home. It’s part of a zero-waste system that diverts 7,000 pounds of coffee grounds a week into a delicious and nutritious food source. Their production process also results in nutrient-dense soil amendment suitable for fruit and vegetable gardens.
The duo spent four years in business school together but they barely knew each other then. The seed for the company was planted by a visiting lecturer in a business ethics class who mentioned that women in Columbia and parts of East Africa were growing mushrooms from coffee grounds to fight malnutrition. This got the guys thinking about America’s coffee addiction and the farming, food, and financial potential of a consumer waste product destined for the landfill.
That idea spawned some serious mycology research and, in short order, led to the lads producing around 500 pounds of oyster mushrooms a week for Northern California Whole Foods stores and local farmers’ markets. BTTR then “mushroomed” into a D.I.Y. enterprise; their Gourmet Garden Grow-it-at-Home Mushroom Kits retail for $19:95 online and are sold in Whole Foods Markets across the country. Their topsoil product can be found in Northern California Whole Foods stores and local nurseries.
The mushroom guys, as Arora and Velez are locally known, passed up lucrative job offers (in investment banking for the Colombian-born Velez, and consulting for Arora, whose family hails from India) to launch their urban farming start-up on a shoe-string budget in a fraternity kitchen.
I met with Arora this week at the company’s warehouse in Emeryville before he flew to Washington, D.C., where the pair accepted their latest honor, a young entrepreneurs award from The Hitachi Foundation (with a $50,000 check attached), before speaking at a Tedx event on Saturday in the nation’s capital. … Continue reading »
