For the past three years, UP Gourmet Foods’ small but dedicated team has been at work gathering, growing, and perfecting a line of mushroom products that will bring an element of woodsy depth to your dishes. The Trenary-based farm harnesses biomimicry and a deep knowledge of fungiculture to provide our area with the best gourmet mushrooms year-round.

Though the farm is in Trenary, the inspiration for it can be traced further south, to a homestead on the banks of the Rapid River.

“It was off-grid, and we were kind of just living off the land,” says Chad Kottke, owner and co-founder of UP Gourmet Foods. “We had a flowing well, no electricity, and it was basically just learning what the land had to provide. We got really interested in mushrooms when we were out foraging, and in the process of learning all of the different kinds of mushrooms that we could eat, we decided to start cultivating them, more as just a hobby.”

Eventually, Kottke and a business partner found themselves with an empty commercial space in downtown Trenary. By March of 2020, he had drawn blueprints for the space and converted it into a mushroom farm using equipment taken from the homestead. By the end of that September, UP Gourmet LLC was officially organized.

Over the course of the next two years, Kottke acquired the rest of the business, the building, and engineered much of the farm’s infrastructure from scratch. “When we first started, I was mixing everything in a cement mixer. I would pour my substrate in, and I would bag it by hand. So eventually, I worked with a welder and I drew up the blueprints, and I designed a system for basically automating the entire process.” Now in the fall of 2023, the farm employs and partners with a team of lab technicians, foragers, and packagers dedicated to the humble mushroom.

Many of the varieties grown by UP Gourmet Foods are sourced from the surrounding forests.

“I’ve found that a lot of species that I’ve cultivated from wild strains have a better flavor than commercial strains,” says Kottke, “I think that when people are developing a mushroom strain, they’re not developing it always specifically for flavor. Sometimes they’re developing it for aggression, and how well it grows.”

This year the farm has a number of varieties continuously in stock. Customers can expect fresh Shiitake, Oyster, Lion’s Mane, King Trumpet, and Chestnut mushrooms, with Hen-of-the-Woods slated to be available this winter.

The farm offers a variety of other products, including chaga, home grow kits for several of their most popular varieties, mushroom spawn, biodegradable mushroom lamps, and a recently rebranded line of dried mushrooms set to hit select store shelves around the central UP. “We take a lot of pride in harvesting our mushrooms at a very specific time and slicing them so that they look really pretty in the packaging, because we want the mushroom not only to be delicious, but we want it to look good on the shelf. We want you to walk through a store and just see the mushroom.”

UP Gourmet’s products be can found locally at their storefront in Trenary, as well as at area farmer’s markets, the Trenary Mini Mart, Limestone General Store, and the Chatham Co-op. They can also be found in Marquette at Tadych’s, Super One, the Marquette Food Co-op, Lofaro’s, and Lakeshore Depot. With the rebranding of their dried mushroom line, they aim to expand into several more locations, including at least two in Escanaba.