Built→Windy City Mushroom
01Farms · Chicago
Windy City
Mushroom
Co-founded a 50,000 sq ft vertical mushroom farm — one of the Midwest’s largest indoor cultivation facilities. It started in a garage with a pressure cooker and a shelf.
Year
2020
Role
Co-founder
Location
Chicago, IL
Scale
50,000 sq ft
Status
Operating
Photo — the grow room
01The brief
Grow food indoors,
at scale, in a city.
Chicago has plenty of demand for gourmet mushrooms and almost no local supply. Everything on the shelf had travelled. The gap was not the market — it was production capacity that could run year-round in a cold climate.
I had already proven the biology in a garage. What I had not proven was whether the same process held together when you multiplied it by a thousand: sterile at volume, consistent at volume, profitable at volume.
02The build
Garage to 50,000 sq ft, in order.
The garage lab
Pressure cooker, still-air box, one shelf. Every variable learned by hand before a single dollar of capital went in.
The first room
One sealed grow room with real climate control. This is where the process stopped being a hobby and started being a spec.
The facility
50,000 sq ft of vertical racking, lab, incubation, and fruiting rooms — laid out so the product only ever moves one direction.
Operations
Sterile protocol, harvest cadence, and a team that could run it without me in the building. The part nobody photographs.
Distribution
Chefs, retail, and eventually schools — turning a growing operation into a supply chain people could depend on.
03The receipts
What it added up to.
50,000
sq ft
An indoor farm that started in a garage.
3,000+
lbs
Mushroom marinara delivered into Chicago schools.
FL→NY
growers
Farmers guided across the country.
1
facility
Among the Midwest’s largest indoor cultivation sites.
04On site
The room, the racks, the harvest.
Incubation
Fruiting racks
Harvest
05What it taught me
The biology was never the hard part.
Anyone can grow a flush. Growing the same flush every week, for years, with a team and a payroll and a contract to hit — that is a different discipline entirely, and it is the one I now teach.
Systems beat willpower. That lesson came off this farm floor long before it became a program.
02Next project
Fungitarian
Food & Lifestyle
—Work with me
I'll help you skip
the expensive part.
Farm design · operations · product · regulatory strategy