The Ireland-raised, Barcelona-based entrepreneur first became interested in mushrooms while developing his functional kombucha brand, a curiousity that soon evolved to fascination. After conducting extensive market research into whether mushroom supplements actually deliver on their label claims, Colchester uncovered concerning findings that revealed a gap in the market for independently verified, high quality extracts.
In 2023, he launched his D2C mushrooms supplements brand Mycogenius, along with a white label products and ingredients firm functionalmushrooms.EU with the hopes of elevating standards across the mushroom supplements industry.
NI+: Tell me about the research you conducted and what you discovered about mushroom supplements on the market?
SC: I have my holding company in Ireland, so I applied for and received funding from Enterprise Ireland to do this research alongside Emma Murphy, senior business development scientist at Shannon ABC, Technological University of the Shannon (TUS).
We conducted independent laboratory analysis of 30 commercially available lion’s mane extract samples, testing for beta-glucans, triterpenes and hericenone C and D.
Beta-glucan content ranged from below 5% to 82%. Both ends of that range are cause for concern. The low end indicates products with little to no meaningful bioactive content. What’s more, genuine lion’s mane fruiting body extracts do not typically exceed 30% to 40% beta-glucan content. A reading of 82% is a strong indicator of manipulation or adulteration, not exceptional quality.
Hericenone C and D, the neuroactive compounds most specific to lion’s mane, associated with nerve growth factor expression, were not detected in any meaningful concentration in any of the 30 samples.
Triterpenes were detected across multiple samples in both batches, but only two samples returned identification scores indicating high confidence in their presence.
NI+: What disparities do you see between what’s on label and what is in products in the market?
SC: When a functional mushroom brand says its product is third-party tested, the reality is sometimes this: Its raw material supplier provided a certificate of analysis (COA) confirming that the ingredient met specifications before it was shipped.
That is not independent testing. That is the person selling you the ingredient, marking their own homework and mostly doing so in an in-house lab, creating a clear conflict of interest.
A supplier COA tests the raw material before formulation, capsule filling, blending and packaging. It does not test the finished product. It does not test what’s in the capsule after flow agents have been used to fill it.
Genuinely independent third-party testing means a laboratory with no commercial relationship with the supplier or the brand analysing the finished product, the capsules, the powder, the product as sold, conducted by ISO/IEC 17025-accredited laboratories.
Using ratios like 10:1, 15:1 as a quality indicator makes no sense. There is no assay for extraction ratio. It is unverifiable without independent testing for the actual quality markers, beta-glucan content, hericenones, bioactive compounds, that the ratio is supposed to represent.
NI+: What production factors impact extract quality?
SC: First, the growth medium. Rather than growing on grain spawn, better quality extract are being grown on logs or whatever natural medium that species requires. For example, our reishi is all log grown in the ground, and our lion’s mane is grown on hardwood sawdust.
In Europe and North America, most commercially grown mushrooms are instead cultivated on grain spawn in laboratory conditions. This produces a more controlled environment but often at the cost of the diverse substrate conditions and traditional growing knowledge that contribute to genuine bioactivity.
From my own research and experience, it does not produce the same sort of quality raw material or give the mushrooms the appropriate length of time to grow before harvest. The amount of beneficial compounds found in reishi, for example, at five months compared to 11 months is going to be quite different.
And then there’s the extraction process, which impacts the quality. Mushroom powders exported from China are routinely steam-treated to meet microbial safety standards required for export. Steam treatment does break down some of the mushroom’s chitin, making certain compounds marginally more accessible, but it is not an extraction process.
Despite this, I’ve seen suppliers and brands marketing steam-treated powders as extracts. Functionally, these products are closer to raw powder than to a true water extract or dual extract, which involves targeted dissolution of specific compound classes under controlled conditions over time.
But advancements have been made in extraction technologies. Beyond standard dual extraction, our supplier applies additional chromatographic purification steps that isolate and concentrate the specific bioactive compounds we’re targeting while removing impurities. It goes beyond what most of the industry is doing at the extraction and purification level.
NI+: What else does Mycogenius do to ensure and communicate its quality across batches?
SC: I believe we need to be testing for species specific compounds so I have sourced ISO-accredited labs that test for these compounds .
We publish a COA for every batch via QR code on the product packaging. Testing is conducted by ISO 17025-accredited third-party laboratories, including Alkemist Labs, Eurofins and Omnient Labs, on the finished product, covering species-specific bioactive markers.
Our supply chain is fully organic, from our suppliers through to our co-packers, who hold organic certification. Every step from raw material to sealed product is handled within a certified organic traceability structure.
We communicate to consumers that our products are fully traceable, batch tested and verified for the quality markers that matter, with full lab reports published on our site.
NI+: What new trends do you see on the horizon in the mushrooms space?
SC: Golden oysters are rich in ergothioneine, a unique, health-promoting amino acid antioxidant, known as the longevity vitamin. Everyone saw at Vitafoods that longevity is the big trend at the moment, and people are looking to see the nutritional differences in the Blue Zones and finding a key difference is that those populations have a higher consumption of ergothioneine. So I can see golden oysters becoming the trending mushroom for longevity.
NI+: What NPD might we see from your brand in the future?
SC: I’ve been looking into how the health benefiting compounds increase and decrease throughout the mushroom’s lifecycle and experimenting with blending extracts from different stages in that lifecycle to get the optimum doses of the different compounds of interest, but I can’t give any more details than that right now.
