🍄 Mushrooms aren’t winning, marketing is

Brands can't get enough of shrooms, bunging them in tea, coffee, beer, chocolate, powders, tinctures and supplements. So what are they getting wrong?

In 1999, Fox broadcast one of my favourite X-Files episodes: Field Trip. It’s a tale of a malevolent, psychedelic mushroom system that entices Mulder and Scully into a cave, where they’re slowly digested by snotty yellow goop. 

25 years since I saw it, it’s still the first thing I think of whenever mushrooms come up in conversation. That, and the story of Horse Whisperer author Nicholas Evans going foraging with a group of friends – all of whom ended up poisoned, and in hospital, after accidentally eating fool’s webcap. 

In 2024, mushrooms are absolutely everywhere. They’re literally all around us – mycorrhizal networks stretch beneath forests and woods – and they’re everywhere in a commercial sense, as brands introduce them into a long list of products including but not limited to: supplements, tinctures, powders, coffee, tea, chocolate and beer. And understandably so, with the value of the ‘functional mushroom industry’ projected at $19bn by 2030.

Cultural strategist Jess Jorgensen has spent the last year getting to the bottom of what’s going on, interviewing founders, mycologists, mycophiles and ordinary consumers from countries around the world, and creating a semiotic analysis of 200+ mushroom brands based in the UK. 

And what she’s found is a lot of confusion, as well as a quietly raging tension, played out between venture-backed brands desperate to capitalise on what could be a hugely profitable trend, and a die-hard community of mycologists who believe fungi, and people, deserve better.

Our relationship with mushrooms is a complicated one. “They are strange, and part of the appeal is how strange they are,” says Jorgensen, who has strong opinions on what she’s named “the mushwagon” – the influx of brands embedding shrooms into products. 

“The mushwagon is all about people and companies saying, ‘What can mushrooms do for us? They can help us with our skin, our minds, our bodies and they can also help the planet, so let’s capitalise on that’. 

“But mushrooms and fungi are properly weaved into culture at a deeper level, so brands hopping on and peppering their Instagram with products that have ‘functional’ whatever… I get upset about it. While I think that’s annoying, and it’ll run its course, I don’t think our relationship with fungi is going to end because it’s much bigger and deeper than that.”

From: Lithographs from M E Descourtilz’s Atlas des Champignons; source: Biodiversity Heritage Library / Lloyd Library and Museum

Over the course of her interviews Jorgensen has discovered some major challenges that mushroom-adjacent brands are going to have to solve. To start with, people have wildly varying associations with them; my brain might go to the X-Files, but plenty of others still leap directly to drugs, or hippies, or creepy, fleshy little gills. 

And brands don’t just have to contend with people’s psychological hesitation, they have to get the language right – something Jorgensen says they’re missing the boat on.

Words like ‘functional’, ‘adaptogenic’, ‘entheogenic’, ‘nootropic’ or ‘biohacking’ – all commonly seen attached to mushroom products – mean very little to the vast majority of people. The names of mushrooms can also be confusing; brands can’t expect the average person to know what reishi, lion’s mane, turkey tail, cordyceps, tremella or chaga is. Really, says Jorgensen, what people want to know is: will this make me a happier, healthier human?

“It’s a huge issue I’m finding when I show someone a pack design from some coffee brand, for example, that says ‘go with the flow’ or ‘adaptogenic coffee with lion’s mane’. Not a single one of those words makes sense to the average consumer.”

It’s not just the language. Many of these brands don’t properly educate consumers on what their product is, how to use it, or what its benefits really are. Companies are simplifying things by positioning themselves in specific categories and demographics – for example, using gym bro branding, apothecary-style bottles or psychedelic packaging (see Spacegoods, with its recent £2.5m seed round). 

In general, nuance is missing. And claims are being oversimplified or exaggerated. Thousands of years of experience and ancient wisdom mean we know mushrooms have significant benefits, but science in the west is very much catching up to this.

“There is science to prove the benefits of these mushrooms,” says Jorgensen. “But the problem is, for certain types of mushrooms there’s not enough yet for people to feel that it’s watertight in terms of how it affects people’s health. And brands are picking this up, and promoting mushrooms like lion’s mane as ‘the smart mushroom’ which gives you focus, memory, clarity, fixes brain fog and is neuroprotective.

“These are great claims. But it’s also dangerous if you're promoting these types of narratives, because people expect a lot. People speak to me, and say, ‘I didn’t feel anything’. So I think there’s overclaim, and the way brands talk about mushrooms has led people to expect something more than what they’re getting.”

A recent extract from Nicholas P Money’s Molds, Mushrooms, and Medicines also touched on this challenge: “A cure alleged for everything is an effective treatment for nothing.”

From: Fungi collected in Shropshire and Other Neighbourhoods, 1860-1902; source: Biodiversity Heritage Library / Lloyd Library and Museum

Jorgensen also points out that we’re still learning about some of the subtleties – for example, how does the growing substrate change things? Does lion’s mane affect people differently if it’s been grown on hard wood as opposed to grain, or coffee grounds, or straw? Is it better to use the fruiting body or the mycelium in a product? In most cases, companies offer very little transparency about any of this, and consumers are unaware of where ingredients are sourced or how they’ve been produced.  

 “They are winning because of great marketing, not because of doing right by the mushrooms,” says Jorgensen. 

With all this in mind, it’s understandable that the wave of trendy mushroom brands is causing immense frustration amongst the mycologist community – a subculture that’s spent years contributing knowledge and research around how we can work with mushrooms and how they can benefit people. 

“These guys are not totally happy with the whole venture capitalist side of the business, because it’s someone with great funding and branding, and it’s that very shallow mushwagon,” explains Jorgensen. “It’s not being done in the right way, and it’s ruining it for the rest of them.”

However, there is a more optimistic take on all of this, which is that the growing fascination with mushrooms isn’t just part of the trend cycle, but a bigger shift in culture, and maybe even a way of challenging the big systems so many of us are trapped in. 

“It’s a reawakening of a psychedelic renaissance, or a re-orientation towards consciousness, or a re-evolution, or a re-matriarchalisation of things, or a de-colonisation of food ways or medicine,” explains Jorgensen. “It’s much deeper than slapping something on a product.”

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