Over the last decade, many mushroom companies have come and gone, but North Spore has expanded their repertoire to include grow kits, educational events, and research scholarships since its inception in 2014.

I had the pleasure of chatting with Louis Giller recently. In this interview, we discuss the secret to their success, their commitment to paying it forward, truth in advertising… and (always a reader favorite) mycelium versus fruiting body.


Louis Giller’s journey into mushrooms

Vivian K.:

How did you first get into mushrooms?

Louis Giller:

I first started to really take on mushrooms as a serious interest as a junior in college. I read a book called ‘Mycelium Running’ by Paul Stamets. It’s a visionary book with a lot of interesting research about how mushrooms can help save the world, and it blew my mind. A buddy of mine and I were in an ethnobotany class, and we read that book and then decided to recreate some of the research. We got a couple grants. And so, I was really hooked by their remediation capacities and was surprised how neglected mushrooms were in biology class. 

Later on, I became a big forager and farmer.

VK:

Oh, you really ran with ‘Mycelium Running,’ didn’t you?

My first book that really got me hooked into mushrooms was ‘MycoMedicinals’ by Paul Stamets. I was really looking into immunity and immune conditions, and thought, “They just seem too good to be true”! Their ability to balance without overshooting or undershooting seemed magical to me. It’s as if they almost know what you need.

LG:

I’m gonna temper some of that language a little bit.

They’re not magical. It’s food, it’s nutrition, and it’s medicine in some cases. And there can be too much. Chaga is a great example. I love chaga, but chaga is not something you want to be drinking multiple cups of every day because it is really high in oxalates and can cause kidney stones and things like that. Reishi can lower blood pressure, which may not be desirable to an extreme degree.

Mushrooms are being touted as being limitlessly good for you, and that’s not necessarily the case. But I do think as a society, we’ve sort of eliminated them totally. But, if used as a consistent and thoughtful part of our lives, they make us better.

You mentioned immunity. If you think of mushrooms as a food group and a functional supplement group that was eliminated from our lives over a few generations, and then you look at some of the health problems that we’ve had… I really think that adding them back in is beneficial. I know it’s helped me. That is one person, that’s not data.

VK:

Absolutely. And I appreciate the tempering. Though, I still say they’re magic. 

And I say this only because, in the Western world, we’ve kind of gotten used to more is better. We tend to think that if Chaga is good, for example, then eating 10 pounds of it a day could only be a good thing. We want to hoard it.

But the truth is that in most instances, it would take copious amounts of mushrooms to have undesirable side effects, whereas most of our current medicines all come with side effects when taken in small doses.

LG:

Let’s take Lion’s Mane as an example, which is probably the most mushroom right now. It’s on a trajectory to just explode, along with Turkey Tail, Reishi, and Chaga, because it’s such a great culinary mushroom too, and because the cognitive effects are so attractive to people. 

Because it’s a food source, you can just eat a plate full – make yourself a mock crab cake. This way, the toxicity is non-existent and you’re just incorporating it into your life on a steady, long term basis.

People tell me sometimes that they pop a Lion’s Mane capsule and immediately they feel smarter. I think that’s more of a placebo – that’s not how this works. Incorporating it into your life, into your diet regularly is the way to go about it.

Taking some capsules like the ones North Spore sells, and making it a daily habit is great. We recommend starting with one, but it is safe to take more. 

One of the things we’re getting at here is that there’s a lot of individual experimentation, frankly, that needs to be done. But, many of these mushrooms are very safe and their track record goes back thousands of years. 

VK:

I hear what you’re saying. And to be sure, the studies are useful for people who want to validate their efficacy. 

But, as you said, these medicines have been used for thousands of years in traditional Chinese medicine, in Ayurvedic medicine, and they’ve been around a whole lot longer than our scientific system has.

So even with my science background, I think that the discipline is still very new and evolving compared to these ancient systems of health. 

LG:

Absolutely. There are also lots of traditional guides and that can be super valuable. And people can go find this medicine for themselves. They can source it from all over the place, and find out for themselves.

My dad had prostate cancer, sort of still does, unfortunately. That happens to one in seven men. Reishi has a lot of great traditional uses for that, and once the research is finally done, it will validate what these traditional practitioners have already known.

When we hear health claims, they often sound so nebulous. “The Mushroom of Immortality” is so broadly applicable – for sleep, allergies, mood, energy, and more. But, it’s just really targeting those building blocks of the immune system and making it function better at whatever it needs to do.

When you look at what mushroom polysaccharides can do, which is just one of their active ingredients – it’s remarkable.

VK:

Yes, and there’s a lot of science behind it, especially coming out of Asian countries.

I know Japan has some studies with Mitake and cancer. There are Siberian studies on Chaga and cancer, too.

LG:

One of the other things that my dad takes along with Reishi is a Cordyceps tincture for energy. And there’s a lot of good research on that. Its different active compounds may need to be extracted differently. Like cordycepin can really benefit lung health and energy.

And so he’s on board with having as much energy as he can, having grandkids, you know?


North Spore’s origins

VK:

Could you tell us a bit about the origins of North Spore, and how these 3 college buddies, Eliah, Jon, and Matt, came together to start this thriving mushroom business?

LG:

The three founders of North Spore went to a tiny liberal arts school called College of the Atlantic in beautiful Bar Harbor, Maine. And it’s a really funky place with a lot of individual attention that allows students to really design their own majors. This bunch of really, really smart kids became really close there. Then, they each went off and sort of did their own things. 

Eliah was more into building things, greenhouse management, business, and some farming… generally speaking though, he had more of a business mind. Matt went into fine foods and photography, and worked for a wine company. And Jon went off and got a Master’s degree in Mycology in Wisconsin.

After he graduated, Matt worked for a short time for a big mushroom company. Soon after that, the three of them reconnected and talked about the opportunities in the mushroom world, because Jon had become aware that things were really on the cusp of exploding. They sort of already were. This was about 11 years ago.

So, North Spore began ten years ago in a little garage. According to Eliah, in that first year, their water pipes froze. They didn’t even have running water when they first

rented the place. They got the absolute cheapest place they could find, and everything was held together by duct tape and elbow grease for a while. They were growing mushrooms out of buckets using straw. And after a year or so, they moved into a bigger space in the Dana Warp Mill in Westbrook, Maine. 


The expansion and success of North Spore in the mushroom industry

LG:

I came on board during their third year, and there were only about ten employees at the time. Now, we have about 75. North Spore has become one of, if not the largest, mycology supply companies of a certain type in the country. We really have sort of exploded because there are other companies that sell grow kits and some that sell grain spawn. But we’re pretty much the only company that does all of those things.

We have a huge breadth of really high-quality products all across the board.

VK:

You have culinary mushrooms, too, right?

LG:

Yes, that’s what we specialize in.

We’ve got great dried Porcini, Morelles, Black Trumpets, and Matsutake. Those are awesome. I forget sometimes that I could go grab some Trumpets and throw them on a pizza. I’ve also been meaning to get some, grind them up and make Black Trumpet or Porcini salt to just have around at home. 

We don’t sell anything containing psilocybin or any spores, anything of that nature. We believe that psilocybin should be legalized and used medicinally. We think it’s a really powerful medicine, but we sell grow systems and substrates. These things could be used to grow those things, if they are legal in your jurisdiction. But, the only genetics that we sell are culinary and medicinal. 

VK:

So, the grow kits or blocks that you sell are created indoors in a contained environment and then the wild/dried stuff, you’re foraging? Is that right?

LG:

One of the really cool things about North Spore is that beyond just selling all these different products, we make so much of it.

We’re vertically integrated with a very advanced lab. And we’re doing everything mostly from tissue culture, or cloning. We pull stuff from deep freeze and extrapolate it onto grain, so we’re making it all in-house. There are also a lot of things that we do outsource.

We are not going out and foraging all of those wild mushrooms. We work with several companies. We used to buy a lot of local wilds, and now, we source from companies like that really specialize it in it, and can get us that consistent quality and supply.

VK:

I recently spoke with a mushroom farmer out here in California who was talking about how difficult it is to scale a mushroom business in the US.

LG:

I think that some products may have hit their peak, you know, market saturation. And there’s market factors beyond the industry that may cause some companies to fail.

I just am really happy that North Spore is so diversified, because when individual sectors start to experience turbulence, we have other things to fall back on. Some of [the diversi​​fication] was accidental. When the pandemic hit, we literally lost our restaurants – they just went “poof.” But we had other stuff going, and saw demand skyrocket for our other products and just went all in on those things. 

We came at it from a lot of experience growing mushrooms, that a lot of people didn’t have. We had the ability to create spawn and grow kits along with all of these other products. And we just kept seeing opportunities in different places, and pivoted as needed.

There has been a really supportive business community. We have done a lot of bootstrapping with North Spore, but there have also been grants and bank loans.

We’ve sought that money out, and so farms should definitely not expect to be doing this all on their own when they want to expand, and become more resilient. They should look to their community to find out what kind of money is available.


North Spore’s commitment to advancing mushroom science

VK:

And you’re really kind of paying that forward in your own unique way, by way of the grants North Spore is now offering for research.

LG:

You’re absolutely right.

We have two ways that we really are supporting folks in that way. 

We have a research partners program, and people with research ideas can send proposals in. If we’re interested, we can provide all sorts of technical expertise and materials for them to conduct that research. We just gave some stuff to some researchers at the University of Iowa. There’s the informal stuff that people will reach out about, too. We will chat with them, and if we’re into what they’re doing, we’ll just hook ’em up. Then, there’s some larger-scale research projects that get really looked over and approved by our lab manager as more of a formal application process. 

Then, we also have a scholarship program. Let’s say you’re a grad student in mycology and you need a new microscope or something. We’ve given some really brilliant people those types of scholarships.

VK:

So heartwarming.

Could you share a little bit about something exciting that’s come out of that research that you’ve helped support?

LG:

I’ve been meaning to follow up with this, but I just think it was the coolest.

One of our grant recipients is from the University of Vermont, and he wanted to see if you could grow wine cap on cannabis waste. Wine cap is probably the easiest, most aggressive mushroom to grow outside in beds. It shows all sorts of potential for remediation and it’s a very tasty, beautiful mushroom. And, there’s a lot of hemp waste being generated by some farms. A lot of times, they don’t know what to do with it.

They may compost some, or turn it into bedding, but the systems haven’t been put in place for that. But, it may be possible to introduce it into mushroom substrate or be used to grow mushrooms right beneath the crop. Anyway, he designed probably the most well-thought-out and comprehensive study I’d ever seen with tons of different plots, lots of different experimental protocols. We gave him more wine cap and bags of spawn for research than we’d ever given anybody – somewhere around 200 bags of spawn. 

I was worried that, because Vermont had gotten so much rain and flooding last year, that the whole thing was ruined. But then I talked to Rachel on our team and found out that it’s still going, which is awesome.

Outcomes from research like this will be really helpful, and can help get people on a path. When something like this gets published, it can really lead to action.

VK:

So great!

And all of the research that you’re funding is US-based?

LG:

We’d be open to Canadian, since we sell in Canada and work with Canadian affiliates.

One of the requirements is that, all our packaging needs to have French on it. So, that’s been a process. And obviously, any living products are more complicated to get across international borders for good reason, right?

Otherwise, it’s all North America as of now.


Empowering food sovereignty through mushroom cultivation

VK:

I know that you guys started this company with the thought of helping people access and grow their own food, and to get closer to food sovereignty.

LG:

I think it is incredibly important to take charge of your own food, and to appreciate and understand both growing and foraging your own food. It’s good for the soul, for one thing. It’s very fulfilling, and I think, an important activity. Cultivation is very human.

It’s part of what we do, beyond just feeding your stomach. You really gotta start somewhere, and a Spray & Grow Kit is a great introduction to experience growing your own food. You can get quite a lot of food, about a pound or two of gourmet, fresh-as-can- be mushrooms. 

Understanding how to cook them is another aspect of this. They taste better cooked, the nutrition is more accessible, and oftentimes, there are harmful compounds that dissipate during the cooking process. There was just a big Morel poisoning this year. And everybody’s like, “Oh, my God!” But, you know what? They ate raw Morels, and you’re not supposed to do that. They are gourmet, but they have hydrazine, which is bad for your belly. So, you need to be cooking them. Then, all of a sudden, they’re amazing.

Many of these poisonings happen just because people are preparing them improperly, not because mushrooms are dangerous and scary.

Also, they’re just not as good… cooking changes their texture so they’re not so mushy.

And there’s an art and a science to that.

Plus, there’s a lot of potential here for folks on a budget to produce a ton of mushrooms for themselves using very low-tech methods. We talked about the way that North Spore started on a shoestring budget, growing in buckets. Well, Oyster mushrooms in buckets are where it’s at, and you can really produce a lot. And, in a lot of developing countries, they are doing exactly that. Growing mushrooms on all sorts of agricultural waste products is spreading like wildfire. So, there needs to be a network for them to get spawn and other things.

We have gotten emails from Uganda, Indonesia, Australia, South America, Panama, Honduras, Colombia, and Japan – they should be teaching us. We had Australian farmers come visit during a tour. People email from all over looking for spawn, looking for genetics, looking for expertise, offering to fly us down at times, to get the help they need. There are people out there that travel around and help poor communities start up mushroom farms. I think that’d be a cool adventure. Maybe I’ll do it myself. It’s just not the right time in my life since my wife is having a baby.

It’s not really hard to grow mushrooms, but once you start talking about farming at a larger scale, it’s pretty tough.


Navigating the ups and downs of a mushroom farming industry

VK:

I was recently talking to a mushroom farmer out of California, and he was saying that there were dozens of farms that popped up then just suddenly went out of business in his area.

And that’s the great thing about this community, is that even though businesses may compete with each other, there’s still this willingness to help up-and-comers.

LG:

Everybody and their uncle seem to want to start a mushroom farm. And then after a while, it’s not going anywhere. They drop out and it’s sort of a cohort, right? These things come in waves, and collective knowledge and decisions seem to happen and influence the zeitgeist. 

The mushroom business itself is gonna continue to grow. It’s bumpy, but we have not reached peak mushroom consumption. It just takes some people coming and going, and some consolidation – like with any industry. I hope this doesn’t happen with the specialty mushrooms, where it all just becomes massive farms like you see in Kennett Square, PA. I hope that there are still community farms, and that the economics work for that.

But this ties back to the individual. People can grow their own, too, and we want to empower that.

VK:

There are massive mushroom farms in PA?

LG:

Oh, yeah.

This is where mushrooms in America began. Italian Americans who owned horse farms in the area realized they could use their manure to grow mushrooms off of it. And now, there are massive, massive mushroom farms there that pump out millions of pounds of mushrooms.

VK:

Are they manure-based?

LG:

The button mushrooms are. Button mushrooms, Crimini, and Portabello – they’re all the same mushroom.

Most of those companies have diversified now, and do more of the gourmet variety, too – Shiitake, Oyster, Enoki, King Trumpet, and other varieties.

They just have huge operations and distribution networks, any supermarket on the East Coast, certainly gets their mushrooms from Pennsylvania.

And they have a massive mushroom festival every year, and are on a whole other level.

This year, there was a big conference, and it was all of those guys. We didn’t see where we fit in, but a bunch of well-known and well-respected small and medium-sized specialty mushroom guys also attended and that’s very interesting. It’s really good that they had their foot in the door. I’m gonna call out a guy named Eric Myers. I don’t think he knows me, but I really respect what he does. He’s a brilliant engineer and puts together all his own stuff. He’s a vet. He builds his own bagging machines and mixers. 

It’s really important because otherwise people have to go to China to get their stuff because the equipment that’s available is aimed at much larger operations. So, he’s aiming at the small to medium sized mushroom farm that we’re seeing more and more of. And so, he was at the conference, along with some other really savvy people.

Speaking of savvy, Amy Fox has been with North Spore since the beginning. Now, there’s a savvy farmer right there. As long as all these people want to be in the mushroom game, I think they’re going to make it because they know it really well.


The mycelium vs. fruiting bodies debate and transparency in mushroom supplements

VK:

Does your work involve advocating for transparency and authenticity of product and origin? In speaking with some others in the business, some of them seem perturbed that certain companies are outsourcing the initial phase of product-making to Chinese affiliates, then shipping to the US to be finished. These items are being sold as “Made in the US” at much lower prices. 

It’s also difficult for a consumer to really understand what they’re getting, especially when it comes to supplements.

LG:

We’re not not against stuff being grown in China per se, because China has a thousand years of mushroom experience and knowledge, and they’re really the best at it, by far.

People need to understand that when we’re talking about mushrooms, you can’t necessarily think about China in the same way that you might with certain other products.

Then again, we definitely want American-made. We want to do as much as we can in the US because you’re just gonna have more control and it’s gonna help our economy. So, we’re always aiming to get what we can here.

When it comes to supplements, there is this debate over fruiting body versus myceliated grain. And it can be very confusing. I’m working all the time to understand it better myself. At North Spore, we wanna be as transparent as possible. And one of the reasons it is easy for us to do that is because we use 100% mushrooms – not mycelium.

When you see mycelium in a product, it could theoretically be pure mycelium, made in a liquid culture or a bioreactor. But it’s not. It’s [usually] grain spawn. We sell grain spawn to farmers to grow on substrate, and that grain spawn is colonized with that mycelium, but it’s still mostly grain. They basically just grind that up and make extracts, so the profit margin is fantastic. And, a lot of that is made in the US. So, they can say those two things. But as far as efficacy, I think that’s the big problem there. Even though some mushrooms may come from China, they’re [actually] mushrooms. If people want mushrooms, they can get both. There is research that backs up that the mycelium may have really powerful compounds in it – only for lion’s mane. There’s not a whole lot of research into the benefits of mycelium in other species. Although it’s reasonable to think there might be valuable nutrition in the mycelium, I look at it as they’re cutting their stuff. It’s sort of a cheat code, and they are charging just as much.

We were at the mushroom summit in Denver that happened before the MAPS conference, and it was only like 100 people. It was great networking, and there were some really interesting things that came out of that. 

There were some representatives from a leading mushroom company there to talk about supplements, and they basically stood up there and shared their [in house] science outcomes, took no questions, and just left the stage. It was unbelievable. They’re using their own money and clout now to prove something that was unproven and to force that narrative.

I was so worked up about this, because some of the claims these companies were making were that 90% of the grain is converted to mycelium and stuff like that.

Generally speaking, that just never happens. So, that’s just a lie.

VK:

Did you see the consumer survey, “What is a Mushroom?” that Nammex conducted?

LG:

Yes, and we’ve signed it. Nammex has said to us recently that we shouldn’t use the term “fruiting body” anymore, because it is more of a technical term. So, just call it a mushroom, because that’s what it is. I think that helps clarify a little bit for people that we’re either talking about a mushroom, or we’re talking about not a mushroom.


VK:

Are you familiar with Alan Rockefeller? 

LG:

Yeah. Alan’s a homie.

He’s one of those guys that everybody just loves. His brain is just different. We met up with him in Telluride, and got to go foraging.

We wanna get him out to Maine to teach some DNA analysis classes, genetics or microscopy classes maybe, and just go foraging with us again because that’s really, really fun. Him and Mandy may actually be coming to the big Sam Rictich foray the New England Mushroom Federation is putting on in Cape Cod this October. It’s a pretty big deal. All the nerdy, mycology people who can get to New England and who are part of that community will definitely be trying to make it to that. I hope it’s a good year for mushrooms. You’ll be able to get just about anything identified by some of those people.

It’s gonna be fun.

So we’ll just keep it up and stay in touch.