Soko Mushrooms

Welcome to Soko Mushrooms! We are so grateful that you are here.

You must be wondering why we chose to grow mushrooms. You are probably thinking its because we love of mushrooms. You would be right, we do love to eat mushrooms. The real reason though is because we care about producing healthy food, recycling agriculture waste, and sustainable farming.

Every year farmers in Zimbabwe face a hunger season, between when they plant and harvest their crops, primarily maize. They rely on a single crop for their income and food.  Unfortunately due to climate change, their harvests are generally unable to meet their nutrition and income needs. We saw mushrooms as a great alternative. They require limited land, recycle agriculture waste, grow year round and produce fertile composts.  Zimbabweans also have a long, but forgotten history of foraging for mushrooms.

Our goal at Soko is to sustainably grow and process healthy, delicious oyster and button mushrooms on our farm in Ruwa, Zimbabwe. Ruwa is just outside of Harare in Mashonaland East. We  also provide hands on training and support to a network of farmers to help them grow mushrooms. The waste from growing mushrooms is a high value soil amendment that we use  to improve soil health for our vegetable and crop fields. It’s truly a closed loop system.

We are sisters Kundai, Eleanor and Rumbidzai. Farming is a big part of our DNA. Both our parents are entrepreneurs, as was our late paternal grandfather who was a commercial farmer and entrepreneur since the early 1950s. We were brought up on  the farm in Ruwa, Zimbabwe.

Our farming enterprise begun when Kundai graduated from college in Missouri and went back home to Zimbabwe to help revive our family farm. After much research on mushrooms in the local market, and finding that most of the mushroom were imported, we decided to grow our own. We registered our company in 2012, and spent 2013 building our mushroom farm. We officially started operations in January 2014. We realized after numerous requests that we needed to grow the opportunity beyond our own farm, so we developed a mushroom training and partner farmer program.

Our Name “Soko Mushrooms”

Our name comes from our totem Soko (Shona word for Monkey). It represents our family values,

Get in touch with us whether you are a supermarket buyer, farmer, supplier or someone interested in mushrooms or training.