Our story
A gap in Manitoba's food scene — and the people to fill it.
Manitoba Metis Mush was founded by three people who saw the same gap in Manitoba's food scene: an unstable, inconsistent supply of gourmet mushrooms in a market full of foodies and chefs who want them.
What started as conversations between farmers and chefs became a plan — pair Métis ownership and local growing know-how with serious mushroom expertise and the engineering muscle to scale it.
Today we grow Lion's Mane and King Oyster mushrooms in Manitoba and deliver them fresh to Winnipeg home cooks and restaurants every week.
The founders
Alex Kohut
Co-founder · Métis grower
Alex owns Cal's Crops, an urban vertical farm that has supplied microgreens to Winnipeg restaurants for over five years. Talking to chefs every week, he kept hearing the same thing — they wanted reliable, locally grown gourmet mushrooms, and couldn't find them at the scale they needed.
Ryan Maione
Co-founder · Master mushroom grower
Ryan has been growing mushrooms for over 12 years. As the owner of Psilogen Biotech, a mushroom substrate supply company, he was looking for the right opportunity to scale his expertise into a consumer-facing brand.
Trina Semenchuk
Co-founder · Biosystems engineer
Trina is a biosystems engineer and the owner of Little Greenhouse That Could — a company on a mission to scale up controlled-environment agriculture across Canada.
Why Métis ownership matters
Manitoba is the homeland of the Métis Nation. Building a Métis-owned agricultural business here is about more than a label — it's about contributing to a stronger, more sovereign local food system. Every mushroom we grow stays in the hands of people who live and work in this community.