Mushroom consumption has been growing about 10 percent annually over the past few years. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Growing popularity among diners

Yan, who works for his family business which sells premium mushrooms and vegetables to Japan and South Korea, noted that exports used to account for 90 percent of the company's earnings.

His company, Xintian Fungus, has been in the business for more than two decades and is among the top exporters in Yunnan province. The company sells a wide variety of gu, cultivated mushrooms that are available all year around, and jun, wild edible fungus that grow in forests and are harvested only between July to early September every year. The price of the latter is typically five to 10 times higher than the former.

He explained that while Chinese consumers are no strangers to savoring mushrooms, it was not until about three years ago that demand picked up in major cities such as Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou of Guangdong province.

Today, most of his customers that buy matsutake from his online retail store on Taobao.com, the country's largest online retail platform, come from China's Yangtze River Delta region, especially Shanghai.

"If matsutake is available all year round and Shanghainese consumers continue buying them from me at this price, I could soon be a billionaire and buy myself an apartment in Shanghai," he laughed.