I was part of a team experimenting with mushroom packaging about 3 years ago. While we had quite good results material-wise, we couldn’t really make the total environmental equation work on smaller scales. Growing the mycelium really fast and efficiently requires quite a bit of energy input (heating, humidity controls, airflow…) and you need to source quite a few ingredients for the growth medium. I’d be curious what the total ecological impact is if all of those inputs are factored in when doing it on a large scale (like Ecovative).
I agree with most of the points in your blog post and would also not recommend to take the 'labs' approach. My team and me have dropped our 'labs' company just recently. We have built extremely innovative algorithms to tackle a huge problem but completely failed to define and follow an actual product vision and strategy. Our motivation went down over time and our individual visions became more and more misaligned.