Specialty mushrooms are a growing interest to consumers and producers alike, however, getting supplies — either to small farms or to the people directly — can be an issue.
Portland, Maine-based mushroom-farm-turned-supplier North Spore has faced both sides of this problem. The company answers it with mushroom grow kits and homegrown specialty mushroom spawn.
Matt McInnis, co-founder of North Spore, described the past 10 years as driven by interest in all things mushroom. Everything from growing interest in meat substitutes, psychedelic therapies being legalized in some states and even the HBO show “The Last of Us,” with its fungal plague, has played a role.
“There are all these different elements of the zeitgeist that fed this boom in mushrooms,” he said.
The Mushroom Council President and CEO Amy Wood contextualized the consumer-side interest to The Packer.
“While the specialty mushroom category is small (roughly 2% of annual mushroom volume), it’s doubled in the past 10 years,” Wood said. “Shoppers are becoming increasingly aware of the array of specialty mushrooms available now: shiitake, oyster, maitake, lion’s mane and more.”
Indeed, according to The Packer’s Fresh Trends 2024, almost 10% of surveyed shoppers reported buying specialty mushrooms in the previous 12 months. Shiitake especially got its own callout by survey respondents.
Specialty spawn is hard to find
Currently, North Spore makes and supplies specialty mushroom growing kits for home growers and specialty mushroom spawn to small commercial mushroom farms. But it began in 2014 as a mushroom farm distributing specialty mushrooms to restaurants, grocery stores and farmers markets in its area. McInnis said both his company and other small mushroom farms ran into supply issues.
“If you wanted to procure spawn from another company, you’d have to work with these large legacy mushroom spawn companies that catered their business to the button mushroom industry,” he said.
“We discovered that there was this big demand for specialty mushroom spawn for these small growers, so we started producing an excess of our spawn and then selling it to other mushroom growers,” McInnis continued. “That kind of got us thinking about the different products that would be helpful for small mushroom growers. We incrementally added on to our product portfolio.”
Homegrown specialty mushrooms — literally
One of those products was home grow kits aimed directly at mushroom-curious consumers, something McInnis said he has seen growing demand over the years, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“With the pandemic, you had this huge boom in gardening and growing your own food and becoming self-reliant,” he said. “A lot of our products fit right into that niche.”
McInnis said that North Spore offers both indoor and outdoor growing kits for specialty mushrooms like shiitake, oyster, lion’s mane, wine cap and others.
“In an outdoor context, really you can grow prolific quantities of edible mushrooms,” he said. “Mushrooms also happen to be super high in protein. It’s pretty difficult to grow your protein source.”
Wood said that interest in growing specialty mushrooms at home isn’t too surprising given the building interest in them overall.
“Research shows us that active mushroom consumers are diehards for mushrooms — they don’t just like them, they love them,” she said.
The potentials of mushroom growing
McInnis said consumers interested in growing specialty mushrooms can easily add them to existing gardens. He described his own gardening strategy, saying he heavily mulches his garlic and inoculates the mulch with wine cap mushrooms.
“While I am waiting for my garlic scapes and bulbs, I’m harvesting edible mushrooms from my mulch,” he said. “The cool thing about mushrooms in a garden context is that they are part of a nutrient cycle that exists in the garden anyway. They are decomposers, which are very important to plant health. By growing mushrooms in your garden, or inoculating your mulch, you’re able to break down that organic matter, free up nutrients, and feed your plants. It just adds to that nutrient cycle.”
That dynamic works on a larger scale too, McInnis added.
“We work with a lot of diversified vegetable farms that have really benefited from using mushrooms,” he said. “They create a polyculture, and there’s a lot of things being cultivated and harvested from a smaller amount of space. By incorporating mushrooms, it’s almost like companion planting but not competing for the same resources.”
Small farms using this strategy have the benefit of a diversified revenue stream, McInnis said, noting that mushroom cultivation can fit well with existing vegetable farms.
“Mushrooms grow on a different time scale from the plants, and [growers] are able to use shadier parts of their land or their wood lots,” he said. “The vast majority of the work for mushrooms happens very early spring or late winter as opposed to throughout the growing season.”
Reflecting on the past years at North Spore and looking forward, McInnis said he was excited about what the future holds for specialty mushrooms.
“There’s lots of different ways that we can grow mushrooms, and it is a constantly evolving and expanding technology,” he said. “There’s a lot that we are still learning.”
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