North Spore, the Westbrook-based mushroom farm, has won Greenlight Maine and its $100,000 top prize, just weeks after the company won the Launchpad business plan competition.
Three judges selected North Spore as the winner on the television show’s final episode, which you can watch on Greenlight Maine’s YouTube channel. North Spore pitched on the final episode alongside two other Portland-based startups, Forager and Zootility. The judges were Danielle Conway, dean of the University of Maine School of Law; Kathie Leonard, CEO of Auburn Manufacturing; and Mike Herrin, COO of Emera Maine.
Earlier this month, North Spore won Gorham Savings Bank’s Launchpad business-pitch competition and its $50,000 first-place prize. The mushroom farm is the first company to win both the LaunchPad and Greenlight Maine competitions in the three years that both have been held in June.
“This is an amazing windfall for us; this capital will go a long way in helping us bring mushroom growing to the masses.” said Eliah Thanhauser, North Spore’s co-founder who represented the company in both pitching competitions. “And this recognition is a great honor and a testament to how far we have come since our humble beginnings in a 500-square-foot garage in Westbrook. I worked hard on preparing for these pitches, but it is still a little hard to believe we won both.”
Thanhauser founded North Spore in 2014 with Jon Carver and Matt McInnis, two friends he met while at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor. The friends started the business in a 500-square-foot garage in Westbrook with roughly $10,000 in startup capital. They started off washing their equipment and mushrooms with a garden hose in the driveway, but within six weeks they had harvested their first mushrooms and were selling to restaurants in Portland.
Today, North Spore sells its mushrooms to more than 75 restaurants and grocery stores in Maine, and works with specialty distributors in Boston, New York, and Seattle.
While the fresh-mushroom business is where the company got its start, and still represents a majority of the company’s revenue, Thanhauser said the company sees great potential in the scalability and profitability of selling mushroom spawn—the genetic material used to cultivate mushrooms.
The company has invested in its e-commerce platform and its online sales of mushroom-growing supplies, including spawn, has increased year-to-date by 440%, according to Thanhauser.
After Thanhauser’s pitch, Leonard asked him what differentiated North Spore from its competition.
“No one is doing it the way we are. We are really taking mushroom growing into the 21st century,” he said.
While home gardening is a multi-billion-dollar market, Thanhauser told the Greenlight judges that no one has yet to tap into it to introduce mushroom growing as a viable option for home gardeners.
“I think in three years we could be a $5 million company. I think there’s a lot of growth potential there,” Thanhauser told the Greenlight judges.
North Spore plans on using the $100,000 to purchase new equipment to make its spawn production more efficient—as it said it would use Launchpad’s $50,000. It now also plans to expand its facility to increase production capacity and to begin producing high-quality educational videos to help people learn about mushroom cultivation.
