Misty Mountain Specialties supplies chefs and consumers with a wide variety of products including fresh and dried mushrooms as well as other unique products such as wild fiddlehead greens, wild berries, and sea asparagus.
BRITISH COLUMBIA – Misty Mountain Specialties has uncovered a treasure trove of products on the forest floor.
Wild mushrooms with exotic names like chanterelles, porcini, lobster, shitake, pom-pom and oyster mushrooms – along with fiddleheads, wild onions and even stinging nettles – are purchased from foragers, processed by 20 employees at Misty Mountain’s plant in Port Coquitlam, and shipped to customers across North America.
Owner and manager David Lee Kwen started the company in 1997 to feed his passion for fungi when only white button mushrooms were made available in stores and restaurants. He changed the mushroom scene by presenting oyster mushrooms to Canadian chefs, and was the first to introduce European-influenced cremini and portabella mushrooms.
The company now wholesales products that are grown wild, all the way from the Yukon to the West Coast of North America, and sold in fresh or dried packages, as well as specialty produce like gooseberries and passion fruits imported from other countries.
“We sell mostly to high end restaurants,” says Lee Kwen. “We listen to our customers and produce the items they require. We clean up the products at our factory because they arrive in bulk, after being foraged from the forest.
“The leaves from stinging nettles make a nice salad, and people pay big money at fancy restaurants for them,” he notes. “Fiddleheads are the top of the fern, which come out just before spring, before the top unfolds. Once they unfold they’re not edible anymore. Fiddleheads are a side dish, and in a French restaurant, if they put three fiddleheads on a plate with a nice piece of fish, they can upcharge $10.”
Lee Kwen says the firm has buyers across North America, including Vancouver Island, and most notably Campbell River.
“We start from the Yukon and follow the mush-room trail all the way down to San Francisco,” he explains. “As the weather cools down, we move further south to harvest.
Hotels, bars and restaurants are booming when the pickers come through a town, as they come from all over the country, mostly from Quebec.”
Misty Mountain Specialties has earned a reputation for its service and ability to source out unique, quality products.
“Not too many people grow these items, and some of it is harvested in the wild,” he notes. “It’s up to the weather patterns, and if the weather is not right, there will be no production. Right now it looks like there might be a good crop of Morel mushrooms, which come up after forest fires. We didn’t see too many fires in Canada over the past year, so we may be harvesting more Morels down south this year.”
Besides helping create a solid business at Misty Mountain Specialties, wild produce is a good, healthy food source.
“If you’re living, you might as well eat well,” he says, noting he believes in sustainable, healthy and tasty food. “I may live longer, too, because all of these things are better than organic, because they are wild. They are the mother of organics.”
mistymountainspec.com
Business Examiner Staff
