Mushroom Alchemy or How to start your own medicinal mushroom company
If there’s only one learning you can take with you from this case study, it’s this: If you can’t find a product that meets your standards, make it yourself.
That’s what the star of this case study, Joanna Maja from Mushroom Alchemy, did. She couldn’t find a medicinal mushroom blend that met her standards, so she decided to make it herself.
That meant she had to start her own medicinal mushroom company and find a supplier who could provide her with medicinal mushrooms that met her standards. Eventually she found us, was impressed by our mushrooms and helpful staff, and has been a happy customer ever since.
The End.
However, if you’re interested in the details of how it’s like to create a medicinal mushroom brand (and why she chose us as her supplier) we recommend you continue reading.
Joanna shared with us some very interesting insights from her brand-building journey, from tasting mushroom powders to dealing with authorities in different countries and cultivating personal relationships with customers.
The cast of the case study:
The company: Mushroom Alchemy, a medicinal mushroom company selling two medicinal mushroom products through their online shop as well as in cafés and health food stores in Copenhagen.
The products: A mushroom blend consisting of eight mushroom extracts (chaga, reishi, lion’s mane, maitake, shiitake, tremella, Agaricus subrufescens and Cordyceps sinensis) and a mushroom blend consisting of powdered lion’s mane extract.
The target audience: Health-conscious consumers mostly in Denmark, Sweden and Poland, buying their products online through their store or from cafés and health food stores in Denmark.
Note to self: If you can’t find a product that meets your standards, there’s a gap in the market
Many great products and companies have been created because someone couldn’t find what they were looking for and decided to make it themselves.
This is also what happened to Joanna back in 2018, when she was looking for a functional mushroom blend. She had (rightly) high expectations for the quality of the product: She wanted the mushrooms to have a positive effect, and she also wanted them to taste good.
However, no matter how many times she ordered something different, she was unable to find a product that met all her criteria. It dawned on her that she probably needed to make the product herself and start her own brand. Because there was clearly a market gap for such a product.
Mushroom Alchemy was born.
Rule number 1 of starting a medicinal mushroom company: Find a great supplier
Now, if you are planning to make a product that people should eat or drink, you need to find great ingredients. You do not want to make a product that has any risk of being dangerous for people’s health because there is something wrong with the ingredients.
P. S. We talk more about how to spot high-quality medicinal mushrooms in this article, so you can use it as a checklist when choosing a mushroom supplier.
In any case, you should have high standards for your mushrooms, just like Joanna. She searched for medicinal mushroom suppliers all over Europe and beyond in her quest to create the best mushroom blend there is.
Eventually she found us. And that was the beginning of a great relationship between our two companies. Or rather between two people, Joanna and her account manager, Ines.
Why Joanna thinks Mycotrition is a great supplier
Joanna praised especially two things about us: the helpfulness of Ines, and the quality of our mushrooms.
She received valuable advice regarding products and regulations
Joanna was really grateful she could rely on someone who has had years of experience in medicinal mushrooms. She had a lot of questions, and Ines was more than happy to answer them.
For example, Ines gave her advice about different mushrooms that Joanna could use instead of the ones she wanted at the time, which were not available. Ines then sent samples of those mushrooms for Joanna to test.
Ines was also invaluable in helping her navigate some of the legal issues involved in selling medicinal mushrooms. We can’t give you legal advice or advice about other countries because that’s not our specialty. But Ines was able to guide Joanna in contacting the right authorities and asking the right questions.
Joanna said that with Ines’s help, the only thing she had to worry about was running her side of the business. A bit like in that song from Jay-Z, at least medicinal mushroom raw materials weren’t an issue.
Our medicinal mushrooms met all her quality criteria
Good service is one thing, but Joanna was also looking for the best produce. She tested a lot of medicinal mushroom raw materials from different companies, from Finland to China. And among all those other companies, our mushroom products were the ones that convinced her for these reasons:
We can show a standardized amount of polysaccharides in our products
All of our extracts (with a few exceptions) are standardized for 30% polysaccharides. We can also test this ourselves.
Joanna said it was important for her to be able to give her customers a number for the amount of polysaccharides because not every potential supplier was willing to do that. Also, most of the studies related to medicinal mushrooms are done with 30% polysaccharides, so she could trust that this was the right amount to have.
Our mushrooms are effective as we only use the fruiting body and a careful extraction process
The fact that we only use the fruiting body and hot water as the extraction method was also a big selling point for Joanna.
Joanna said that our mushrooms really helped her with the minor health condition she had at that time. She was therefore convinced that our mushrooms have a high bio-availability, i.e. effect on the human body.
The reasons for this are that we use only the fruiting body of the mushroom in our products, and the careful extraction process with hot water. We only use double extraction with water and alcohol for our specialty extracts.
Our mushrooms blend well with water
Joanna was also very pleased with how well our raw materials, or mushroom extracts, blended with water. This was very important as she didn’t want to add any other ingredients to her product to help with water-solubility.
Our mushrooms taste good
Joanna told me she couldn’t believe how good our mushrooms tasted when she received the end product. This was also the feedback she received from others.
A great tasting product was crucial to Joanna because great taste is also a Unique Selling Point (USP). Not everyone likes the taste of mushrooms, but people would often still take the product for the health benefits. However, Joanna wanted her product to not only work, but also taste good.
Our products are organic
With the exception of specialty extracts, every single dosage form of every single mushroom species is available in organic form. Some dosage forms are also available in conventional form, but most of what we offer is organic and produced according to the EU guidelines for organic production.
Rule number two: Be prepared for changes in the market (with a great partner)
However, the use of medicinal mushrooms as dietary supplements or functional foods isn’t that well established in most European countries.
As a result, authorities at the EU level as well as local governments can quickly change their minds about whether medicinal mushrooms need additional approval processes before being able to be sold or not.
Joanna had to go through something like the beginning of her company’s journey. Initially, her mushroom blend included turkey tail and cordyceps militaris. However, the EU and the Danish government kept changing their minds about how these mushrooms could be sold. In the end, Joanna swapped out these mushrooms for others to avoid extra hassle.
Fortunately, she had a great partner to guide her through this stressful time. Ines was able to warn her early on about the potential extra hurdles regarding turkey tail and cordyceps militaris, so that she was more prepared. Ines could also suggest mushroom species that could then replace turkey tail (Agaricus subrufescens) and Cordyceps militaris (Cordyceps sinesis.)
Rule number three: Get familiar with how your target country embraces medicinal mushrooms
Knowing your customer is the mantra of any business. For medicinal mushroom companies, the mantra is: know how well your target audience knows about medicinal mushrooms.
Joanna’s two main markets, Denmark and Poland, have very different attitudes towards medicinal mushrooms.
The market in Denmark is still quite young and there is a lot of room for growth. The Danes haven’t fully embraced medicinal mushrooms yet, although both sales and the number of competitors are growing.
Poland is the second target market, as the company recently moved its headquarters there. The Polish market is also challenging in its own way.
First of all, the Polish people aren’t as interested in organic products as, for example, some Western European countries. So having an organic product is not a selling point for them.
The Polish people are also used to getting their medicinal mushrooms relatively cheaply. This makes it harder to sell high quality products that are also organic as both are more expensive.
However, in Poland you can say much more about the effects of the mushrooms than in Denmark, which makes it much easier to market them. As long as there is at least some clinical evidence done on mice or in a lab, you can use that as evidence of how the mushroom works.
Rule number four: Cultivate offline relationships with your customers
Nowadays it’s easy and technically a must to market your products through various online channels. But don’t forget the importance of meeting your (potential) customers in real life.
That’s also a big philosophy behind Joanna’s marketing efforts. In addition to social media and the online store, she also sells her products through cafes, which is a great way to meet people.
She often likes to just go into cafes and talk to the owners and introduce her products to them. Or she might have a business meeting in a cafe, which gets the owner interested in learning more about the product.
People ordering a mushroom latte made with Joanna’s blend is also a great way to introduce the product. If the customer likes what they are drinking, they can buy the product later. As people returned to the cafes after the Covid-19 restrictions, Joanna noticed a spike in sales. The tactic is working.
And it’s not just Joanna who has seen this tactic work. Our sister company, HKS Austria, has also used offline events to connect with their audience and introduce their product, CordyXtreme, with great results.
One last secret tip from Joanna
Congratulations, you have made it to the end of the case study! You’ve earned one last tip from Joanna about creating your medicinal mushroom product.
And that is to get your medicinal mushrooms from us!
Okay, it sounds pretty obvious that she would say that since this is a case study, but hear us out.
Joanna told us that a lot of people ask her where she gets her mushrooms, and she confessed that she would rather not answer. Because to answer would mean that others would discover our raw materials and enter the market with the exact same great products.
We can’t really blame her, who wants to give away their USP? That’s why we are even happier and humbled to hear her praise us. This is exactly what we strive for in our daily business: to provide the best possible medicinal mushroom raw materials.
That they are so good, our customers would rather keep it a secret.
But now the secret is out!
Would you like to have one less thing to worry about when creating a new medicinal mushroom product? Contact our team and order your mushrooms from us!
But be quick, before someone else reading this case study comes up with the same idea!