Mushrooms as future food: A production-system and recipe-level life cycle assessment for sustainable diets

Food systems must evolve to remain within planetary boundaries, and mushrooms offer a low-impact, circular alternative, yet evidence from real production systems remains scarce. Here, we present the first production-system life cycle assessment (LCA) of commercial Danish mushroom cultivation, combined with a recipe-level application LCA to evaluate downstream dietary implications. The production assessment quantifies environmental hotspots across production, packaging, and distribution, while the recipe-level analysis examines the potential of mushroom-based dishes to reduce meal-level impacts in an institutional kitchen. The findings show that mushroom production exhibits concentrated environmental hotspots, and that reuse of spent mushroom substrate (SMS) can reduce overall impacts by nearly 40%. Substituting meat with mushrooms lowers dish-level emissions, typically exceeding 40% reductions, with mushroom-only falling within planetary-boundary targets. Packaging, particularly moulded fibre-based formats, remains a significant contributor to overall impact. Overall, the study identifies mushrooms as a low-impact, circular food that can substantially reduce both production- and meal-level emissions, positioning them as a practical lever for climate-aligned institutional diets.