We recently connected with Erik Lomen and have shared our conversation below.

Erik, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you share a story that illustrates an important or relevant lesson you learned in school

Learning to shoot film photography at a young age helped me understand why “pace” is so important in life. Growing up you are seeking approval and looking for it from all sorts of elders; parents, grandparents, older siblings, etc. But when these beings of importance begin to slip away you have to readjust your focus to find the detail that is driving you. This focal readjustment is central to mastering the modulation of pace. In photography you have f/stops which allow you to adjust how “open” or “closed” a lens is. The smaller the hole exposing the film through the lens, the longer the exposure needed to capture an image but the greater the field of depth, think Ansel Adams’ extreme detail from foreground to background. Everything comes into focus the longer you look at a scenario with properly adjusted eyes. With a wide open lens, your film is bombarded with light really fast, only allowing you to focus on a sliver of the detail in the time and space you are capturing. This is what is referred to as a shallow depth of field. The harder moments in life can usually become defined by these narrow margins of focus where the detail in the background and foreground drops off entirely into faded soft blurs. Coming of age and losing guiding forces who once possessed pockets full of approval exerts a force on oneself that allows for the development or atrophy of pace when consulting your internal f/stop. Following the metrics of photography helped me master my own pace and slowly collect pockets full of approval from experience and pass it on to folks seeking it. I had no idea how much this focus and interest into pace would help me in business as in life. In the simplest of statements I always refer back to my fathers little sayings, of which a popular one was “timing is everything”.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

Myself and my business partner Christopher Campbell started Maine Cap N Stem in 2014 cultivating a variety of gourmet mushrooms from spore to store below the streets of Portland Maine. Within a year our fresh mushroom production expanded from 200 sq ft to 3000 sq ft.

Between 2015 and 2016 the decentralized micro mushroom industry began exploding all across the country and at the time it was integral for each of these small farms to develop their own cultures, spawn and fruiting substrate to grow fresh mushrooms and supply a self built distribution system for sales to farmers markets, restaurants and wholesalers. In 2016 We decided to drop out of the fresh mushroom market all together and work directly with these farms all across the country to supply their growing mushroom demand with Ready To Fruit substrate.

This transition set a business pivot into motion as we became to first national producer and distributor of Certified Organic Mushroom Substrate for small and large farms across the continental USA and Canada. In 2016 we moved to our current 20,000+ sq ft facility in Gardiner Maine and began producing and supplying dozens of farms with an easier scalable option to grow by skipping the intensive lab work to produce their own spawn and substrate and simply focus on fruiting and selling fresh mushrooms. Within the last 5 years we have proven the model to work and continue to support the growth and development of fresh mushroom farms around the states.

In 2019 we developed a state of the art spawn production facility and expanded our offerings from simply substrate to spawn and culture products as well as “combination substrate pellets” for farms to forward integrate and scale up into their own substrate production for a balance of options and supply chain diversification allowing a higher level of control for each farms independent focus.

With each year that passes as we continue to grow, innovate and develop, our goal remains the same, to help independent farms sustainably grow to supply the massive demand for fresh mushrooms across all markets. We recently purchased a 30 acre property in Lewiston, Maine with 75,000 sq ft of production space that we are building out to continue this mission.

Have you ever had to pivot?

The pandemic effected everyone in so many different ways and at wildly different times. The resilience of an industry with as slim of margins as food always has to be looking for small adjustments and alternative opportunities to keep the ground stable as you grow. It seemed like we had about a single week from hell that I assumed might be the end of Maine Cap N Stem as one farm after another called us to cancel their rolling orders as restaurants and grocery stores shut their doors for an unknown period of time. I convinced several companies within weeks to work with us to white label their “fruit at home” grow kit sales and within a couple months time we had pivoted almost exclusively to supplying the stir-crazy and quarantined masses with fungal entertainment on their countertops. Within a half of a years time we were fulfilling orders for a dozen “kit companies” filling tractor trailer truck loads with individual kits for the retail buyers of the country. After about a year into the pandemic sales of the retail variety began to wind down right as grocery stores and restaurants began to open their doors back up and farms began getting their rolling orders back in with us. two pivots in one year’s time was something no one could have predicted, but we survived and thrived in it.

Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?

Before the land of mushrooms sunk its hooks into my day to day I owned and operated a letterpress company, printing broadsides, books of poetry, posters, cards and everything in between on manual and motor driven large cast iron presses from the late 1800’s. My late wife and I moved to Portland Maine in 2011 and I immediately made friends with all the pressmen and woman of Portland’s underground letterpress scene (yes, this was in fact a scene in 2011). One of these individuals was Lisa Pixley who started Pickwick Independent Press. Within a couple of days I was helping her and her husband move a big press 3 stories up in downtown Portland with a boom crane. Lisa and I began hunting mushrooms together and after sometime away traveling the country and starting a mushroom farm in AZ, I came back to an unexpected proposal to continue down the mushroom train with Lisa and her husband, Christopher Campbell, my now business partner.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.capnstem.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mainecapnstemco
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mainecapnstemco/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6OQ0URajvMbA_t0JtF9Flg
• Other: www.mycowizards.com