Matthew McInnis loves mushrooms. He got into them as a teenager while working at a local restaurant on Mt. Desert Island off the coast of Maine. He remembers feeling particularly elated after foraging a bunch of chanterelles near the woods of Acadia National Park and handing them to the chef.
"That sort of kickstarted this real, kind of, passion about learning about wild mushrooms," McInnis says, adding that a lot of his late teens and 20s were spent in the woods hunting for fungi.
He turned his passion into a business in 2014, launching Portland, Maine-based North Spore—originally a fresh mushroom farm, and now a mushroom growth and supply company—with two other botany-loving friends from college, including co-founder Jon Carver, who has a master's of science in mycology.
McInnis and his co-founders launched their business out of a building with no sink and began growing mushrooms indoors. By 2019, they had stable restaurant clientele and some e-commerce and planned to expand it. But the pandemic made it necessary to execute the hard pivot to online sales and mostly drop the fresh mushroom sales outside of what was needed to continue to make their products, McInnis says.
Read more at Inc