When three friends from college decided to start a mushroom cultivation business in 2014, they wanted to be as close as possible to Portland, where they all live, and needed an affordable rent. They, too, ended up on County Road.
In a year and a half, North Spore mushroom company outgrew the 1,000-square-foot space, but it didn’t have to leave town to find a new one. The company moved to the Dana Warp Mill less than two months ago, into an area that’s more than five times the size of the former facility, where there wasn’t room to produce more than 200 pounds of mushrooms per week.
“It’s more about how many mushrooms we can produce than about finding the market for them,” Matt McInnis, one of the three partners, said about the high demand.
The company, which supplies mushrooms to more than two dozen restaurants in the Portland area, as well as specialty food stores and farmers markets, plans to double production in the next six months, but doesn’t expect to be going anywhere soon.
