Here are more fascinating tales you can’t help but read all the way to the end. That passion may also have to do with new applications of mycelium, and novel research into its seeming world-saving potential. Mushroom import and export is an enormous worldwide business, with the mushroom market expected to reach $86.6 billion by 2025, according to the market research company IMARC. In regions like Appalachia, wild mushroom hunting - particularly for morels - remains part of the rural foodways.Īnd while urbanites tending mushrooms in cramped apartment kitchens may seem a far leap from those traditions, their interest in fungi - along with the continuing rise of meat-shunning diets - is a small component of a global passion. In France, virtually every town has its own mushroom expert, trained by the government.Ĭolonizers brought these traditions to the Americas, where Native American people had also been eating foraged mushrooms forever. Rich mushroom foraging traditions have been passed down for centuries in several parts of Europe as well, where going to a forest on the weekend to pick mushrooms is still a common family outing. Customers tagged Smallhold in endless posts of sculptural mushroom clusters that emerged, somehow, nearly overnight.Īcross Asia, mushrooms have long been prized, for food and flavor, medicinal and ritualistic purposes, and in poetry and prose.
Smallhold, a farm in Brooklyn that had previously supplied restaurants with mushrooms and installed mini mushroom farms in commercial kitchens, also had a spike when it pivoted to at-home mushroom kits as restaurant orders dried up, the farm said. Sales of introductory mushroom growing supplies had increased 400 percent during the pandemic over the previous spring, he said. “It’s been a very steep increase in sales,” said Matt McInnis, one of the founders of North Spore, in Portland, Maine, which was started in 2014 by three friends who went mushroom foraging together in college. I called two mushroom farms that had supplied the bulk of my friends’ kits and learned business was booming.
The kits for growing pink oysters, which emerge as a cascade of salmon shingles, were particularly photogenic. Sacks of sawdust filled my friends’ counters, each frothing over with bulbous lion’s mane or disgorging scaly oyster mushrooms. We’re at that perfect stage of growth, where we’re still small enough for you to make a major difference, while big enough to have resources to do amazing things.That is where the fungal gardener comes in: If you cut an X in the plastic and spritz that X with water a few times a day, the mycelium will find their way to that spot, communicating across their many tendrils to coalesce into solid flesh, and will burst forth as mushrooms. Exponential growth, North American distribution, an ever-expanding product portfolio that goes well beyond grow kits, and a growing community of North Spore enthusiasts and social media followers around the world who sing our praises and treat their friends and family to their homegrown shrooms. When we launched in 2014, we were a vertically integrated mushroom farm, but have now grown into the Northeast’s premier mushroom supply and cultivation ecommerce company with a state of the art inhouse laboratory, mushroom spawn production facility, research farm, and digital education center.Īs a leader in the field, we are constantly innovating and developing new products. We’re passionate about cultivating food, foraging for mushrooms, and ‘Spreading the Spore’. Specifically, we help people grow mushrooms and as a result, are growing at an unprecedented rate. At North Spore we want to make the world of mushrooms accessible to everyone, and we’re looking for a Facility Manager to help us realize our vision.