How to grow gourmet mushrooms with Full Pin's hybrid Hochelaga laboratory-farm

If you're standing outside their complex of commercial, industrial and office spaces all blending into Hochelaga's industrial landscape, there isn't much to see. Inside, however, there's one DIY series of rooms which look more like a punk take on a biotech startup: Steam hisses from custom-built sterilizers, sensors monitor humidity levels in real-time, and hundreds of bags of what looks like decomposing wood sit on metal racks that reach towards high ceilings, sprouting everything from oyster mushrooms and shiitake to lion's mane.

It's where two former engineers, Vathana Len and Daniel Vogt, have built the lab-farm hybrid Full Pin to offer a new way for how Montreal restaurants, and Montrealers at large, can think about urban agriculture. The business model is simple: grow the highest-quality gourmet mushrooms possible and deliver crops grown the day before within 24 hours to restaurants within a 10-kilometer radius, all without distributors, middlemen, or inventory sitting in refrigerated trucks for days. Simple, see?