Benjamin Chesler

North Spore sells mushrooms before they are mushrooms. Grain spawn. Sterile substrates. Grow kits that turn a kitchen counter into a tiny, fruiting forest. It is a one-stop shop for anyone who wants to grow oyster, lion's mane or shiitake at home, and for the commercial farmers who need the raw material by the pallet. Since 2025, the person running it has been Ben Chesler - and his arrival says a lot about where this scrappy Maine company thinks it is going.

Chesler is not one of the three founders. North Spore was started in 2014 by Eliah Thanhauser, Matt McInnis and Jon Carver, a trio of Mainers who learned fungi the slow way, foraging the woods of Vermont and Mount Desert Island. Chesler is the operator they brought in to scale it. He spent 2024 as an advisor, getting to know the business and the people, before stepping into the CEO chair. The fundraise that came with the transition is earmarked for the unglamorous engines of growth: marketing, a retail launch, and more people.

That single sentence explains the whole career. Chesler does not fall in love with products. He falls in love with the machinery underneath them - the flow of a thing from where it is made to where it is wanted, and all the waste and friction in between. Mushrooms are simply the latest system worth optimizing. Before them, it was groceries. Before that, it was the dining hall.

01 The food nobody wanted

The origin story starts on a college campus, not in a boardroom. In 2011, as a student, Chesler co-founded the Food Recovery Network with a friend, Ben Simon. The premise was almost embarrassingly simple: college dining halls cook far more food than anyone eats, and most of the surplus goes in the trash. So they organized students to collect it and get it to people who needed it. The next year he started the Brown University chapter. The network spread to roughly 150 colleges across the country.

He has said the instinct was inherited. His mother never threw food away and reused storage bags until they fell apart. Frugality, it turns out, scales.

In 2015, Chesler and Simon took the idea out of the cafeteria and into the wider economy. They co-founded Imperfect Produce - later Imperfect Foods - in San Francisco. The pitch: nearly a fifth of the produce grown in America never makes it to a human mouth, often because it is the wrong shape, the wrong size, or simply too plentiful that week. Imperfect bought the cosmetically imperfect stuff and delivered it to doorsteps at a steep discount. Chesler served as chief operating officer, and later chief innovation officer, building the operational guts of a subscription grocery business.

It worked. Imperfect grew from a couple thousand weekly boxes to a national operation. By its own count, the company has recovered more than 250 million pounds of food and delivered over 20 million orders. Along the way Chesler pushed an idea that was unusual for a venture-backed startup: equity for everyone, including the hourly workers in the warehouses. If the system created value, the people inside the system should own a piece of it.

A Brown alumni writer once described him as "focused, fast-talking, and yet preternaturally calm for a 24-year-old." It is a useful portrait. The calm is what lets a fast-talking systems person actually ship something instead of just diagramming it.

02 The Maine years

After Imperfect, Chesler relocated his attention to Maine. He took on a role at the Roux Institute at Northeastern University, where he worked as director of venture creation and acceleration - essentially, helping other founders build and launch companies. It is the kind of job you take when you have done the hard thing yourself and want to compress the learning curve for the next batch. In 2023, Mainebiz named him to its 40 Under 40 list, describing him as a business developer with a history of advancing the future.

When he describes his proudest accomplishment, he points back to Imperfect: a mission-driven grocery store that turned ugly produce into delivered dinners, and one of the early companies to give ownership stakes to its entire workforce. The throughline from a Newton, Massachusetts childhood, through Newton South High School and Brown, is consistent. Find the waste. Build the system. Share the upside.

Food waste, he has argued, is rarely just one problem. It is an environmental problem, a water problem, a climate problem and a humanitarian problem stacked on top of each other. That is catnip for a systems thinker - one lever, many outcomes. Mushrooms, as it happens, sit at a similar intersection: food, sustainability, wellness, and a cottage industry of home growers hungry for good supplies and honest instruction.

03 Why mushrooms, why now

North Spore is, in a sense, the perfect Chesler company. It is vertically integrated, running its own spawn production out of a Portland facility. It is education-heavy, with guides and content aimed at turning curious beginners into competent growers. And it sells across the full spectrum - direct to consumers ordering a single grow kit, and to commercial farms buying substrate in bulk. There is waste to design out, a system to tighten, and a community to serve. The pieces fit his hands.

The company already had momentum before he arrived - earlier wins included pitch-competition prizes and recognition as a Maine innovator. What it needed was someone who had taken a mission-driven food business from a campus experiment to national scale. The funding raised around his appointment is aimed squarely at the next phase: building the brand, pushing into retail shelves, and growing the team beyond its current size of roughly two dozen people.

04 The off-hours

He builds canoes. Not metaphorical ones - actual canoes, by hand, the kind of patient, single-piece craft that rewards the same attention to underlying structure that he brings to companies. He cycles. He spends time outdoors with his family. For a man who has spent his career inside supply chains and spreadsheets, the hobbies skew decisively analog.

There is an earlier chapter that rarely makes the bio, too. As a student, before food waste became his cause, he founded a non-profit aimed at combating child sex trafficking. The specifics differ; the pattern does not. Find a problem most people would rather not look at, organize people around it, and build something that moves.

Those two lines, said about produce years ago, double as a quiet thesis for the mushroom business. North Spore's job is to get living spawn into a grower's hands while it is still viable, and to make something already abundant - the world's appetite for fungi - actually reach the market. Same instinct, new organism.

What makes Chesler interesting is not that he runs a mushroom company. It is that he has now spent fifteen years pointing the same brain at different versions of one question: where is the value that the rest of us are throwing away? Cafeteria trays. Bruised peaches. And now, perhaps, the gap between people who want to grow their own food and the supplies and know-how to actually do it. North Spore is the next answer. It almost certainly will not be the last.