I first heard about Alejandro “Alex” Velez and Nikhil “Nik” Arora’s plan to grow mushrooms from coffee grounds about two years ago. At the time, I dismissed it as one of those ideas that sounds great as part of a green business contest for graduate students but that would probably get dropped as soon as the lucrative job offers came along.

And, for awhile, that’s essentially what happened. Nik and Alex did the MBA thing, interviewing for jobs in investment banking and consulting and securing offers from great firms. But fast forward a year: I’m meeting Alex in a dodgy parking lot under the freeway overpass in Emeryville to tour the warehouse of Back to the Roots Ventures, his and Nik’s start-up. He drives up in an old beat-up sedan and hops out in jeans and a plaid shirt … not exactly banker garb.

We head into the warehouse and Alex introduces me to their warehouse manager and a young intern who’s busily packing cardboard kits. “We came to a point where the mushroom thing was really taking off and Nik and I decided to go for it,” Alex explains. “We turned down our job offers and became farmers instead.”

Well, sort of. What started as a small agricultural business is now a booming consumer product business: Nik and Alex’s Grow-Your-Own Mushroom Garden, a do-it-yourself mushroom-growing kit, is currently sold at all Whole Foods around the country. It’s a pretty amazing trajectory for a business that started just over two years ago as a project in the boys’ fraternity kitchen, with a few buckets-full of coffee grounds and some mushroom seeds.

Both MBA students at Berkeley at the time, the two had shared a class focused on potential business uses for the world’s waste products, during which they learned about various uses for coffee grounds. For some reason Alex still can’t quite explain, he and Nik were drawn to the idea of growing mushrooms from the stuff. They began experimenting and eventually managed to grow oyster mushrooms. “We took them over to some people we know at Chez Panisse to have them try them and tell us whether they thought we had something, and they said wow, these are really good.”

That was their first stroke of good luck: Not every MBA student has connections at Chez Panisse. Buoyed by a thumbs-up from that venerable Berkeley slow food institution, the two took their next batch of product to the popular Berkeley Bowl market. “Then the guy at Berkeley Bowl introduced us to the regional buyer for Whole Foods and once they were interested we started to realize this could really become a business,” Alex later told me.

It may sound like a string of amazing coincidences, but it’s partially the pair’s passion for what they’re doing that has managed to get so many other folks on board so quickly. The Whole Foods buyer loved the idea of mushrooms grown from a waste product and soon had Nik and Alex supplying oyster mushrooms to all of the Bay Area’s Whole Foods, and participating in the market’s local producer loan program as well. The problem? It’s tough to make money in mushrooms unless you’re running a major agricultural operation, and the Back to the Roots guys weren’t really interested in that. That’s where the mushroom kit came in.

Packed with about a pound of coffee grounds plus the mushroom seeds, the Grow-Your-Own Mushroom Garden promises a pound of mushrooms within 10 days. All you have to do is spritz it regularly with the tiny water bottle enclosed in the kit, and keep it out of direct sun. The kit retails for $19.95 and is available at Whole Foods and through the company’s own website. To get coffee grounds they need, the two also inked a deal with Peets, which pays them to pick up over 10,000 pounds a week of grounds, and also sells the kits in some of its shops. Meanwhile, the spent mushroom substrate they’re left with after they make the kits turns out to be an excellent soil amendment, which they’re now selling as well.

Bouncing around aisle after aisle of mushroom kits, Alex is excitedly describing their journey, a tale punctuated often by segues like “Oh! And kids really love the kits, too, and any kid that sends us a photo of them with the kit, we send them a free kit.”

He’s so genuine it’s hard not to get swept up in the excitement, despite the fact that I’m cold and everything smells vaguely mildew-y. And the excitement continues at home, where I’m thrilled to find that even with my minimal gardening skills, the mushrooms were sprouting out of the kit on my counter in days. Sure, I forgot the spritzing half the time, but I still managed to get some nice shrooms out of it, and it’s hard not to feel pretty pleased with yourself when you’re harvesting mushrooms you grew from coffee grounds.

Follow Amy on Twitter @amywestervelt.

If you’re looking for an easy, effective and eco-friendly way to fertilize your garden, look no further than what’s left after you eat breakfast. Eggshells and coffee grounds are two natural ways to help your garden grow.

After you crack open an egg in the morning, wash and dry the shell. Then crush it to pieces in a towel and sprinkle the pieces around your plants. The eggshells provide calcium to the soil so tomatoes, peppers and eggplants will especially benefit as they’re susceptible to calcium deficiency. Another way to boost calcium content in your garden is to use the water from boiling eggs, after it has cooled of course, because the nutrients will remain in the water.

Eggshells do double duty to keep pests away, too. Snails, slugs and cutworms all avoid the eggshells because they’ll feel sharp on their soft bodies.

Coffee grounds can also provide nutrients to your soil. If you sprinkle a small amount of the grounds in your garden, plants can take advantage of the nitrogen, calcium and potassium found there. To avoid any trouble with mold, dry the grounds before using them in the garden.

Image: byte

Every green gardener knows that coffee grounds infuse your soil with nutrients, but with the amount you drink, more ends up going to waste than being salvaged. Fortunately there are plenty of other ways to save your grounds from the dumpster!

You know that fancy exfoliating scrub you’ve been hankering after? Don’t bother shelling out cash to scrub away dead skin cells. Just massage your face with coffee grounds instead for a radiant glow.

Speaking of overpriced beauty products, coffee grounds can also be used in place of costly conditioning treatments for soft and shiny locks. Just work them into wet hair and rinse.

This grooming method can be applied to your pets, as well – and coffee is known to keep fleas away from your furry friends.

Skip the day spa and mix coffee grounds with egg whites for an inexpensive skin-tightening facial mask.

To avoid wasting electricity, you retrieve refrigerator and freezer items with record speed. Or maybe it’s because of that unknown odor emanating from within. If that’s the case, just stash a bowl of dried coffee grounds inside to eliminate the mystery stench.

Unpleasant smells aren’t limited to your freezer – your gym shoes have been known to do a number on your closet after a vigorous workout. Allow coffee grounds to dry, pour them into a satchel made from snagged nylons and hang this recycled deodorizer in your closet to neutralize the soggy stink.

You have a tongue for bold flavors and a penchant for preparing exotic meals. But, the pungent aroma of these zesty dishes tends to linger on your hands long after they’ve been digested. No problem! Just scrub them with coffee grounds.

Sometimes, a sponge and a little elbow grease isn’t enough to scrape food remnants off your dishes, so scour them with some coffee grounds. This resourceful method can be used to clean surfaces as well.

You can even make your own homemade brown dye for paper and fabrics. Similar to making tea, all you have to do is boil a pot of water, take it off the burner, pour in coffee grounds and let them steep.

This process can also be used to cover up scratches on wood furniture. Use a cotton swab to apply this quick fix liquid with more precision.

If you have an ant infestation, scatter coffee grounds around problem areas to repel them naturally.

Instead of inhaling or wearing the majority of the ashes you clear out of your fireplace, sprinkle a layer of coffee grounds over them first to reduce the mess.

For more ways to reuse your coffee grounds, visit Green Daily.

Image: Ayelie