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?

And now? Their product has been in the hands of chefs from places like Montréal Plaza, Monkland Tavern, Jun I, Mui Mui, Buvette Beaubien, and Fleurs et Cadeaux.

The pair had known each other for years before discovering they shared an obsession. Both were fascinated by mushrooms, though for different reasons; Daniel had been researching mycelium as a natural solution to combat tree parasites in urban forestry. Vathana, whose Cambodian background meant mushrooms had always been part of family meals, was interested in their culinary potential as meat substitutes. This grew into what Vathana says they called "fungi tech".

When Full Pin launched five years ago, Montreal's gourmet mushroom scene was pretty limited. You had Les 400 Pieds de Champignon, the old guard, and a few smaller operations focused mainly on farmers markets. Vathana and Daniel saw an opening—not just for different varieties of mushrooms, but for a completely different approach to growing and distributing them.

"We got along during our first beer together," Daniel says about those early conversations. "That's where we established what we wanted to do, how we wanted to work."

Engineering an ecosystem

Everything at Full Pin is custom-built, from the sterilizers that cook substrate at 100 degrees Celsius for 14 hours to the laminar flow hood in the lab where they inoculate blocks with mycelium. The grow rooms are kept at precise temperatures and humidity levels, monitored by sensors connected to software that Vathana coded himself.

"We might be one of the only farms in the country that has its own custom-made environment-automation system," Vathana speculates. He's able to check his phone where real-time graphs track every variable in the facility. Even if they're not on site, they know if something goes wrong.

This level of precision matters because mushrooms are incredibly sensitive. A single degree change in temperature can affect size, color, and shape. They won't fruit properly with too much CO2, and can dry out without sufficient humidity. It's agriculture, but with the kind of attention to detail expected from people who debug code for a living.

The process starts with their substrate, a mix of local hardwood pellets and wheat bran that recreates the nutrients mushrooms would find growing on dead trees in a forest. After sterilization and inoculation, blocks spend up to a month in the incubation room, where mycelium spreads across the surface like white lacework. The blocks actually generate their own heat during this process; to put this into perspective, the room would hit 40 degrees Celsius if it didn't have air conditioning.

"Each block is a living organism," Vathana explains, pointing to bags where you can see condensation from the metabolic heat. "The more you add to a grow room, the more they all affect each other."

It's a delicate yet fascinating ecosystem. Daniel explains the biology with obvious enthusiasm: "It's the flower of the organism," he says about the mushrooms themselves. "The mycelium is decomposing the organic matter inside the substrate, accumulating energy, and then the mushroom is just a way for them to reproduce."

The mushrooms are essentially the reproductive organs of a vast underground network, popping up to release spores and start the cycle all over again.

Scaling the unscalable

There's one challenge that separates Full Pin from the apartment growers and hobby operations popping up around the city. Starting small is easy—Vathana and Daniel began with about 10 pounds a week growing in Daniel's apartment—but scaling mushroom cultivation requires a lot more than adding more space or equipment, and requires understanding how dozens of living organisms interact in a controlled environment.

"Every mushroom farmer will encounter this if they try to scale up," Vathana says. "Having a lot of tech behind it helps because you can keep track of everything and control your growth while keeping customers happy."

They're now producing 700 pounds a week across 12 different varieties, from blue oyster mushrooms (their first variety and still a staple) to King Eryngii, which they're the only farm in Montreal growing. Each variety has its own lifecycle, its own growing requirements, its own way of being harvested. Some get careful incisions in their bags, others have the whole bag removed, still others get the top cut off entirely.

The timing is choreographed. Vathana knows that Monday and Tuesday will bring harvests of blue oysters, while other days bring different varieties. Everything is scheduled so they harvest the same amount each week, with bigger harvests early in the week when restaurants are busiest and lighter harvests on weekends when demand drops.

The spreading network

As an urban farm, Full Pin understands that they're part of something bigger. They work with a network of local foragers who bring in wild varieties—matsutake, chanterelles, the occasional 20-pound haul of Chicken of the Woods mushrooms. They're experimenting with new varieties constantly, testing different strains to see which ones work best with their specific environment and substrate.

And they're thinking beyond Montreal. Other entrepreneurs have approached them about starting similar operations in different regions, turning Full Pin's model into something exportable. It's the mycelium approach to business expansion—send out spores and see where they take root.

"The way we've done things here in Montreal is definitely an expertise that's exportable," Vathana says. "The more people growing their food as close to their customers as possible, the better."

They're also fielding inquiries about other applications for their expertise—medicinal mushrooms, even psychedelics as Health Canada approves clinical trials for depression treatment. It turns out that when you master the art of growing one type of fungus, people start wondering what else you can do.

Full throttle

But for all the technology and precision, Full Pin's success comes down to something simple: they make mushrooms that taste better because they're fresher, handled less, and grown by people who care about the final product. When a chef puts King Eryngii on the menu and gives a shout-out to Full Pin, it amps supporting local business up to recognizing that their mushrooms are different.

"Mushrooms can definitely be the star on the plate," Vathana says. "They're such a great substitute for people trying to reduce meat consumption. Some can replace chicken, some can replace seafood or beef."

It's a philosophy that runs counter to how most people think about mushrooms—as a garnish, a supporting player, something that adds umami but doesn't carry a dish. Full Pin is betting that Montreal diners are ready to think bigger.

It was only after starting the company that Vathana learned that, during the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia when people were starving, his teenage mother found mushrooms growing on a dead tree near a river. She carefully tended her own secret mushroom culture, hiding it under banana leaves and adding rice paddy as substrate so soldiers wouldn't discover her agricultural rebellion.

"She would provide for her family with mushrooms," Vathana says. "So mushrooms have always been part of our family history."

It's a story that puts Full Pin's current operation into perspective. What started as profound ingenuity in wartime Cambodia has evolved into a sophisticated urban farming operation that supplies some of Montreal's most acclaimed kitchens.

The irony isn't lost on Vathana—his mother grew mushrooms to survive, and now he's growing them to help Montreal's food scene thrive alongside his business partner Dan.

It ties back to the name: In mushroom cultivation, "pinning" is the stage where tiny baby mushrooms first appear on the surface of the substrate—sometimes looking like hundreds of small pins poking through. It's always an exciting moment for growers, the visual confirmation that everything is working.

"Whenever we see pins on our substrate, it's always a good sign," Vathana says. "Me and Daniel are like, oh yeah, it's pinning well."

But Full Pin also nods to the engineering expression "full pin"—going full throttle, maximum capacity. It's a double meaning that perfectly captures their obsessive, all-in approach to mushroom farming.