Why Oregon is doing mushrooms right

Ryan Bubriski, Will Fortini, and Zac Tobias
Portland Mushroom Company
Portland, Ore.

Thanks to a soggy climate west of the Cascade Range, Oregon is ripe for growing mushrooms. The boys of the Portland Mushroom Company specialize in an oyster mushroom that’s a borderline local celebrity.

Why we chose these ‘shrooms:

Bubriski, Fortini, and Tobias grow their ‘shrooms in reusable plastic buckets instead of disposable plastic bags, and use a reclaimed shipping container as a climate- and humidity-controlled grow room. They just moved their operation to an old industrial shipping yard that’s now the site of a sustainable-business collective (say it with us: Portlandia skit). By selling at three farmers markets and supplying 10 area restaurants, they regularly sell out their entire crop.

For cofounder Ryan Bubriski, a career in mushrooms was love at first forage:

Bubriski studied fungal ecology at Lewis & Clark in Portland: “We went on an outdoors trip to go hunt chanterelles on the Oregon coast. I was just blown away by the huge Douglas fir forests and the beautiful mushrooms everywhere.”