Do you use fruiting body or mycelium in your products?Updated 2 years ago

The functional mushroom marketplace sometimes feels like the wild, wild West. The majority of products sold as “mushrooms” are actually not mushrooms at all, they are instead mycelium (essentially, the mushroom root system) grown on grain. At Four Sigmatic, we aim to bring the best of nature to fit your daily routine. This means offering ingredients in the way nature intended! When it comes to mushrooms, that means using the real mushroom or fruiting body.

Let us break it down a little further:

• All cultures, traditions, and animals have always consumed the fruiting body or real mushroom exclusively. We believe in the ancient tradition of fruiting bodies of mushrooms, that humans have been using for literally thousands of years.

• The research on mycelium is still emerging, but existing research has shown that fruiting bodies have 15 TIMES more active ingredients than mycelium. (By active ingredients we mean beta-glucans, triterpenes, ergosterol, ergothioneine, etc.) 

• The majority of mycelium-based products in America are in fact, not pure mycelium but myceliated grain where the mycelium is grown on a grain substrate, and this grain ends up being a significant portion of the final product. 

• Fun fact: if you use mycelium you can’t even call it a “Mushroom” according to the FDA!

We serve up mushrooms as they’ve been used since ancient times, in a way that helps everyone to meet the demands of modern life. Using the fruiting body is incredibly more expensive, time-consuming, difficult to make tasty (it is really bitter in its pure extracted form!), but we want to offer you real mushrooms—extracted fruiting bodies—that have the research and tradition standing behind them.

Not finding what you’re looking for? Please feel free to reach out to our Customer Success Team at [email protected] or (213) 699-4616 and we’d be happy to help!