Robin Moore turned a basement hobby into MyCo Planet, a vertical mushroom farm now feeding Kansas City’s top kitchens

Mushrooms are weird.  

They don’t grow from seeds and they don’t use photosynthesis. Instead, mushrooms love the dark and damp, and they reproduce through microscopic spores. Mushrooms aren’t even plants. They belong to the distinct biological kingdom of Fungi. Genetically (and bizarrely), mushrooms are biologically closer to humans than they are to plant life.

See? Weird.

Robin Moore knows all about it. She’s the owner and founder of MyCo Planet, a mushroom farm that’s almost as unusual as the produce that’s grown there. 

MyCo is indoors, first off, in a building off Burlington Street, north of the river. In that decidedly not-rural setting, MyCo practices vertical farming rather than growing horizontal row crops. The company is also female-owned—unusual for any farm. 

Moore met with the magazine on a sunny spring afternoon. After a quick tour, while sitting in a break area, she spoke about the growth of her highly unusual farm. Curly-haired, kind-eyed, wearing a pale green T-shirt and a navy blue hoodie, she talks about growing up on a small farm in Eagleville, Missouri, just a couple of hours north of KC. 

She always loved cooking with mushrooms, she says, and used to forage for morels with her grandfather. She wanted more variety, though. MyCo Planet, in fact, was born from a desire to eat the mushrooms she couldn’t buy.

“I’d heard about lion’s mane or king trumpet and wanted to try those, but I couldn’t find them at the grocery stores,” she says. “So I kind of took it upon myself to grow them.”

She was good at it, too. Soon she was producing more mushrooms in her small basement operation than she could possibly eat on her own. She gave some away to friends but still had a constant surplus. 

Then she got an idea—an obvious one in retrospect: making money. “What if I went to a farmers market?” Moore asked herself. “That might be fun.”

It was fun—and life-changing. In 2020, she started selling her wares at the City Market. “I sold out every time I went down there, so I kept going back,” she says. 

Eventually, the business started to interfere with her day job working as a chemist for a biotech company. She took a leap and quit, deciding to focus full-time on fungus. 

Within a few months, Moore had moved to the Burlington Street space. Within a few years, MyCo mushrooms were being served at some of the finest restaurants in the city. Today, less than a decade later, MyCo is an integral part of the Kansas City culinary scene, with clientele including Whole Harvest, Fox and Pearl, Extra Virgin, Green Dirt Farm and Voltaire.

MyCo also supplies local grocery stores like Hy-Vee, Price Chopper and Hen House. It’s a bit of a full-circle moment for Moore. She started growing mushrooms because she couldn’t find much variety in stores. Now she’s supplying that variety for all of Kansas City.

The farm is worth a visit. There’s a storefront foyer decorated with merch and mushroom-themed art. There’s a warehouse where the pelletized growth medium is bagged and sterilized and a pair of foggy, misty grow rooms where the fungi bloom in eerie silence. 

In those rooms, at any given time, you might find blue oyster, lion’s mane, chestnut, black pearl and more. 

You will not, however, find psilocybin, what with it being illegal in Missouri and all.

Besides, Moore notes with a smile, “that would be a whole separate business. It’s not food. It’s medicine.” 

MyCo does, though, offer medicinal products, including reishi and lion’s mane supplements. The company also sells homegrower kits for anyone who wants to cultivate fungi of their own. 

MyCo has even become something of a national innovator, recently winning a Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education grant from the USDA, which will allow MyCo to research different systems for sterilizing the growing medium.

Food, though, is what matters most to Moore. MyCo grows an amazing 1,500 pounds of mushrooms a week. She is understandably proud of that—and especially of how she achieves it. 

“That’s three tons of fresh, healthy food for Kansas City every month,” she says. “And it’s such nutritious food, and it’s grown so sustainably in comparison to traditional crops. We’re really trying to do it in a conscious way. We try to have a positive impact on our environment.” 

Nutritious food grown locally, sustainably and consciously—all by a female-owned business. 

So, yeah. MyCo Planet, much like the mushroom itself, is definitely a bit unusual. That’s the beauty of it. 

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