The company that decided growing mushrooms at home should be as ordinary as keeping a basil plant on the windowsill.
Above: the wordmark of a brand that started with three friends, a pile of sawdust, and a hunch that the rest of us wanted in on the secret.
It is happening in an apartment in Denver, a garage in Atlanta, a kitchen counter in Maine. A spray bottle, two squeezes of water, and a cardboard box that within a week will erupt into a bouquet of oyster mushrooms. The person doing it has never farmed anything. That box came from North Spore.
From a 25,000-square-foot building on Riverside Street in Portland, Maine, North Spore ships the raw materials of an unlikely hobby: grow kits, spawn, sterile substrates, lab gear, and a wall of mushroom wellness products. The company says it has supplied more than 350,000 growers. None of them, the founders would happily point out, needed a degree in mycology to get a harvest.
We want the world of mushrooms accessible to all.North Spore, on its mission
For most of modern history, growing your own mushrooms meant either a sealed industrial lab or a forum thread written in code only the initiated could read. The knowledge existed. It just wasn't shared kindly. Contamination ruined batches. Instructions assumed you already knew the answer. The whole field had the warm welcome of a locked door.
That was the tension North Spore set out to break: fungi are genuinely easy to grow, and almost nobody believed it. The gap was not biology. The gap was packaging, plain instructions, and a company willing to put its name on the outcome.
The gap was never the biology. It was the welcome.The case for a beginner-first mushroom company
It reads like the opening of a joke, and the founders know it. Eliah Thanhauser had run an organic farm in Downeast Maine. Jon Carver went off to Wisconsin for a Master's in mycology and kept the cultures alive. Matt McInnis shot freelance photography for The New York Times before fungi pulled him in. They met as students at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor - a school small enough that three people with one obsession were bound to find each other.
In 2014 they started a tiny mushroom farm, selling to restaurants and at farmers' markets. The bet came a year later: instead of selling the mushrooms, sell the means to grow them. In 2015 they added grow kits, spawn, and equipment. It was a quieter, stranger business than running a farm - and a much bigger one.
Sell the harvest and you have a farm. Sell the know-how and you have a movement.The pivot, 2015
The flagship is the Spray & Grow kit: a box, a spray bottle, and instructions a child can follow. Mist it, wait, harvest. For the people who get hooked - and many do - the catalog deepens fast. The Boomr Bin, built with Max Yield Bins, is billed as the first automated monotub kit of its kind. Beyond that: grain and sawdust and plug spawn for logs and gardens, sterilized all-in-one grow bags, lab cultures, fruiting chambers, and a wellness shelf of tinctures, capsules, mushroom coffee, and chocolate.
Beginner boxes with a spray bottle and step-by-step instructions. Mist and harvest at home.
A first-of-its-kind automated monotub system for consistent yields. Just add spores.
Grain, sawdust, and plug spawn for shiitake, oyster, lion's mane, wine cap and more.
Pre-sterilized organic substrates, grow bags, chambers, tools, and a living culture bank.
Log, garden, and container setups for growing mushrooms in the backyard.
Tinctures, capsules, mushroom coffee, chocolate, teas, and dried functional mushrooms.
If watering a houseplant is too hard, North Spore can't help you. Almost nothing else is.On the Spray & Grow learning curve
Skepticism is fair. Plenty of feel-good brands never sell a second box. North Spore's defense is arithmetic: a customer base it counts north of 350,000, a building that has grown to 25,000 square feet, an SBA award naming it Maine's 2025 Small Business Manufacturer of the Year, and a reported $2.65 million Series A in May 2026. Third-party trackers peg revenue near $2.3 million. The company now plans to put kits on lawn, garden, and grocery shelves.
Bars are scaled to fit one frame, not to a single shared axis - growers are people, dollars are dollars. Figures from company statements and third-party trackers; treat revenue as an estimate.
350,000 growers is not a marketing number. It's 350,000 chances to be wrong in someone's kitchen.On why the kits have to work
It also gives back to the field that made it. North Spore runs a mycology scholarship, partly because a company built on shared knowledge would look silly hoarding it.
The stated mission - to make the world of mushrooms accessible to all, fostering collaboration and innovation - could be wallpaper at any startup. North Spore's version has teeth because the product is the proof. A money-back guarantee on a living organism is a strange promise to make. They make it anyway. The environmental ethic isn't a slide deck either: mushrooms turn agricultural waste into food, and a company selling that story has to live it.
Good food, good company, and a love of foraging. The rest is logistics.North Spore's founding ethic
Food keeps getting more industrial and more distant. Fungi push the other way - protein and medicine you can grow on a counter from waste you'd otherwise throw out. If home mushroom growing becomes as normal as a tomato plant, it won't be because the science changed. It'll be because someone made the first try succeed. That is the whole bet.
So go back to that apartment in Denver, that box on the counter, the two squeezes of water. A week ago the person holding the spray bottle assumed growing mushrooms was for experts. Now there's a harvest in their hands, and a quiet suspicion they could do it again. That suspicion is North Spore's entire business. Multiply it by 350,000.