While playing soccer in Europe, Charlie Trafford found himself disappointed during trips to the grocery store on visits home to Calgary for Christmas.
"You'd eat the tomatoes or something and there's just no flavour in them, no taste," he said. "And out of a kind of frustration, I started to look a little deeper into it.
"And you realize that there's a ton of issues in the (agriculture) world at the moment with the nutrient levels in the produce, how far they're transporting it. Spoilage. How disconnected we've become from our food system."
Trafford started discussing the issue with his sister Sya Trafford, who has a degree in business with a focus on sustainability. She was working at KPMG in Vancouver at the time, while Trafford was playing in Wales for Wrexham.
The talks turned into a plan and the siblings moved back to Calgary, founding Trafford Farms in November 2023. Within a year, their mushrooms were in more than 40 grocery stores with a "ton more on the way."
"My sister and I are having so much fun," Trafford said. "It's super busy obviously, balancing it with a football career. But it's been a pretty cool adventure."
Trafford is currently in Mexico, attending to his day job.
The 32-year-old Cavalry FC midfielder takes on Pumas UNAM at Estadio Olimpico Universitario in Mexico City in the return leg of their CONCACAF Champions Cup first-round series on Thursday. The Calgary-based Canadian Premier League champion upset the Mexican powerhouse 2-1 in the first leg last week with Trafford scoring.
Today Trafford Farms, with Charlie as CEO and Sya as COO, produces an array of mushrooms that look more like works of art than fungi. Their mushroom menu includes chestnut, king trumpet, lion's mane and yellow, pink and blue oyster varieties.
"It just blew up way faster than we could have ever expected," Trafford said. "I think post-COVID there was a bit of a cry for people wanting local food, wanting kind of high-nutrient, good-quality stuff.
"And they're beautiful mushrooms that chefs love to work with."
The mushrooms are grown in a 10,000-square-foot warehouse in southeast Calgary. But the Traffords are expanding.
They just closed a deal to acquire an out-of-business cannabis facility, measuring some 60,000 square feet, just outside of Calgary that they plan to convert into food production while expanding their mushroom business into Western Canada.
"It's been a pretty insane year," Trafford said. "I didn't think we'd ever move this quickly, I guess, but it's going really well. There's huge demand for it. … No one really imports these exotic mushrooms that we grow because of the relatively short shelf life and they're fairly fragile. So the shipping networks don't work very well for them."
The Traffords offer farm-fresh products, shipping within 24 hours of harvest.
"So we're getting it to our customers at peak freshness and peak quality. And that gives long shelf life, higher nutrient levels and whatnot."
Trafford points to lion's mane, the basis of popular supplements, as his current favourite mushroom.
"The taste, the texture is unbelievable," he said. "And on top of that, you're getting all these insane health benefits from it. … I hand it out to the team quite a lot. I have mushroom orders going out for the team most weeks."
The Traffords learned along the way but now have partners, including a head grower, with expertise in the field.
"Our mission was never mushrooms specifically," he said.
Mushrooms just opened the door. The Traffords recently bought another company that specializes in leafy greens and herbs.
Trafford, who studied commerce at York University and Athabasca University, previously played for clubs in the Netherlands, Finland, Poland and Scotland before a brief stint with Wrexham, owned by Canadian Ryan Reynolds and fellow actor Rob McElhenney.
He met his wife Janette in Finland.
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This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 13, 2025
Neil Davidson, The Canadian Press
