Diversification

Going big with specialty mushrooms on a small scale

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 12:40:41 GMT

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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Frutura acquires Sun Belle and Giddings Fruits, advancing berry business

Mon, 16 Oct 2023 17:48:38 GMT

Frutura has inked two agreements that will underpin the company’s berry business and strategy. The California-based global fruit sales and marketing company has acquired both Giddings Fruit and Sun Belle in a deal that Frutura CEO David Krause has called, “the most significant acquisitions that Frutura has made to date.”

Both companies bring an established, year-round berry business to Frutura. Giddings Fruit, based in Santiago, Chile, is a year-round supplier of organic and conventional cherries and berries, with packing operations in Mexico and South America. Likewise, Chicago-based Sun Belle is a year-round marketer of conventional and organic berries sold under the Sun Belle and Green Belle Brands and boasts well-developed U.S. distribution and infrastructure that includes five warehouses.

In the months ahead, Frutura anticipates a smooth integration of the three companies, as Sun Belle and Giddings have enjoyed a close, decades-long relationship. In recent years, the two berry companies have worked together on distribution, marketing and logistics, with Sun Belle serving as the exclusive sales agent for Giddings’ berries grown in Mexico.

Related news: Coca-Cola enters fresh produce category in deal with Frutura

After the acquisition, Sun Belle Founder Janice Honigberg will continue as CEO and Giddings Fruit’s Julio Giddings will transition to chair emeritus. Both leaders are slated to join Frutura’s board of directors, according to a news release.

The Packer spoke with Frutura’s CEO David Krause, about what these major acquisitions mean and how this “unicorn” is a capstone for the company’s portfolio and growth strategy.

Editor’s note: The following has been edited for length and clarity.

The Packer: First off, congratulations! I’m so curious how these two deals came together. Can you share what it was like to acquire both Sun Belle and Giddings Fruit?

Krause: It’s exciting for us, as you can imagine, to acquire two unique, very distinct businesses that have been operating and working together for quite a long time. There’s a strong relationship between the two of them. The deal is also the fulfillment of our strategy to get into the berry space.

To be able to acquire both businesses, it’s been quite a process, as you can imagine. [Both Sun Belle and Giddings Fruit] see the value in the Futura platform and being part of a bigger organization that’s focused on high-growth crops. We’re excited to have them join the family and add strategically to the berry category for our customers and for consumers.

When did you begin considering acquiring these two specific companies?

Clearly, berries have been on our radar from the beginning. What makes these two companies unique is that the fact that they are a producer and a distributor working together for a long period of time, and they have a 52-week supply for customers in the berry category.

That, for us, hit a bullseye on all the things that we were looking for: high quality, right genetic varieties, 52-weeks of the year supply, multiple production regions around the globe [along with] great customer relationships and great management teams that are all going to stay on.

For us, it was a perfect, unicorn type of an event — you just don’t get these kinds of opportunities very often, if ever. We’re very excited about, it because it feels unique for us.

I think it’s fair to say that they tried to put the companies together in the past, and it just didn’t work out. We were lucky to be that company that had a unique proposition that they understood, and they got. It was the right moment in time for both owners and owner groups to say, “This is the right thing for us to do,” and to put the deal together. Frutura was that third party [that] brought them together, finally. Any good deal worth pursuing, as you know, is worth taking your time.

It’s consistent with the strategic acquisitions you’ve made in the past year, too. With the upcoming International Fresh Produce Association Global Produce & Floral Show, and in the months ahead, what can we expect to see from Giddings Fruit and Sun Bell?

It’s going to be exciting, as you can imagine. We were able to secure space side-by-side, so we have a bigger, broader booth with representatives from the companies across the whole platform. We’re very excited about the coming week and being able to have customer visits and talk about the integration of these two businesses.

As we go into the next six months to a year, we’ll do what Futura does with all our acquisitions. We ask, “How can we help them become better at serving their customers and consumers?” From there we bring to bear the rest of the resources within Frutura — whether that’s growing a specific product line or filling periods of time where they’re a little short on supply.

We see a very busy 12 months ahead but, at the same time, it’s unique because both these companies have been working together for a long, long time. Now we have this unique opportunity to put them in common ownership and unlock that value for our customers and grower co-partners as well.

As you look ahead, are there any challenges that you foresee?

I wouldn’t say challenges — opportunities are what gets me excited the most. Other Frutura divisions are growing berries as well, so we can flow that product and help supply all our customers and markets.

Between the principles [at Sun Belle and Giddings Fruit], they’re going to teach me what they need and how I can help bring that to bear. Whether that’s a new supply of blackberries out of Morocco for the European market, asking, “How [do] we fill in these things that we need from a supply perspective for global marketing?” That’s something that gets me excited.

The potential is amazing with these two well-run companies. We’ll be able to unlock value that they both recognize, but weren’t able to do, separately.

You mentioned that this deal felt like a capstone for Frutura. What makes these two acquisitions central to your plan?

Getting back to the berry strategy was a key element. Now that we’ve acquired all these different companies, we’ve gotten to the scale that we’ve been looking at, and this kind of for us as a capstone acquisition. I won’t say that it totally fulfills everything that we want, but it really is the crowning achievement of the strategy that we set out to grow into. For us, it’s kind of a double award: We’re getting into the berry space, and we’re also achieving the size, scale and depth of crops that we wanted to all along. For us, it’s a moment to celebrate.

Related: Building a one-stop avocado shop: Q&A with Frutura avocado whisperer Stephen Fink