Robert Johnson

But I think that the expectations were really mismanaged, you know, and the way that companies were marketing it, it was like you're going to jump out of your wheelchair or something after taking the picture.

So one thing that experience really taught me, because I worked with hundreds of CBD brands and saw thousands more come and go,

One thing that I want to educate people about in the functional mushroom business, or in the functional mushroom as a consumer, is that there's two different types of functional mushrooms.

I, along with multiple other brands, have petitioned the FDA for clarity in labeling about this.

This is a little bit of an explanation.

OK, so when functional mushrooms grow, right, you take a starchy substrate and that's what you inoculate with the spores of the mushroom.

So it'll usually be rice or corn or, you know, some sort of starch.

And that's what the root system of the mushroom is going to form.

And that's called mycelium.

And when the mycelium forms throughout the substrate, then out of that substrate grows the fruiting body.

And that's the stem and cap or the pom-pom looking thing in the case of lion's mane.

So we're micro-boosted.

And if you're a consumer and you're looking for trying a new functional mushroom product, I would always look for stuff that is labeled using fruiting bodies or fruiting body extracts only.

So I did an article about this for Rolling Stone and got really into the research.

And I thought, OK, maybe there's companies that will take like ours.

We take that fruiting body.

We make extract out of it.

That's what we put in our products.

There are other companies, a lot of them are really big, they take the fruiting body or the companies that are growing it are selling the fruiting body for much more to companies like MicroBoost and then they take the starchy substrate that has mycelium in it and they pulverize that and they sell that as mushrooms.

So fruiting body, when we say there's a gram of mushrooms in it, that's made from the mushroom.