A Facet of Marketing Effectiveness of Button Mushroom Production in Mid-Hills of Himachal Pradesh

Abstract

Mushroom marketing involves promoting and selling mushroom produce to wholesalers, retailers and consumers. Studying the marketing aspect of button mushroom production is crucial because it helps mushroom growers to understand consumer demand, optimizing pricing strategies, identifying effective distribution channels and ultimately maximizing profits by ensuring their mushrooms reach the market efficiently and meet consumer expectations, especially considering the perishable nature of the product and need to maintain supply fluctuations in a dynamic market. In this respect, an attempt has been made in this paper to identifying the major marketing channels involved in mushroom business and the different functionaries involved in transferring the product from producer to ultimate consumers along with their marketing costs, margin, price spread, marketing efficiency and the producer share in the consumer’s rupee. It has been found that three marketing channels were followed in the study area but channel-2 (Mushroom growers—Retailer---consumer) was the most widely used channel in which 48.16 per cent of the produce was marketed by 40.60 per cent of the mushroom growers. The producer’s share in the consumer’s rupee was highest for chaneel-1 (98.87 %) but this channel could absorb only 10.55 per cent of the total produce. Channel-2 was the important channel from the sale point of mushroom as it absorbs 48.16 per cent of the produce and was used by 54 mushroom growers and had 73.65 per cent of the producer’s share in the consumer’s rupee. Additionally, opinion of the mushroom growers and their marketing functionaries were also enlisted regarding their problems and the constraints which hampered them not to take this enterprise/venture as their farming business in a big way. In this context, production, marketing, institutional and social problems are the major constraints which inhibit them not to adopt this venture as their business in a big way.