Howdy Mycofam,

Welcome back to the Mycopreneur Newsletter, your one stop shop to the global mushroom innovation space with a dose of humor and originality.

Today we’re featuring our third installment of this year’s ‘Mushroom Companies to Watch’ , showcasing a roundup of global mushroom entrepreneurship news, and offering an invitation to our weekly Mycopreneur Incubator at the bottom of this newsletter.

This week’s Mycopreneur podcast featured Doc Rob Silver of Real Mushrooms and explores a fascinating emerging category in the mushroom space:

Rob is a holistic veterinarian with decades of experience treating pets with herbal and fungi remedies. On this episode, we discussing a pilot study aimed at microdosing psilocybin mushrooms for dogs that is in its early stages, as well as the broader phenomenon of animals intentionally seeking out various mushrooms in the wild. We cover the growing $500 million functional mushroom supplements for pets market and discuss the

This annual list of mushroom companies to watch is something I’ve been compiling since 2023 with a new batch of companies featured each year. You can find part 1 of the list here and part 2 here

Spore Daddy is a boutique outfit focused on all-in-one mushroom grow bags and exotic liquid cultures. In 2025, the mycopreneur behind this project left his full-time day job to focus 100% on running his mushroom company. The success of his grow bags led him to have confidence that he would be able to sustain himself and his family through mushroom entrepreneurship, and his operation has expanded into a national footprint after the fact. This dedication adn vision to the craft of mushroom entrepreneurship and the personal rewards of more freedom and time with loved ones while helping people connect with mushrooms is a prime example of the huge upside to being a mycopreneur, and the educational and inspirational content that Spore Daddy shares across their social media profiles — including their story of going all in on mushroom entrepreneurship — definitely merits our attention and collaboration as a myco community.

Healing Herbals is a veteran of the nootropic supplement space with a unique category and structuring that features vertical integration with their production partners around the world. The founder Robert Lattig recently joined the Mycopreneur Podcast to share intel about the company’s expanding Amanita muscaria product line 🍄. The global think tank RAND Corporation recently published data that indicate that Amanita muscaria mushrooms are now one of the 5 most popular ‘psychedelics’ — we can debate nomenclature later, this is from their report. The report estimated that 3.5 million American adults consumed Amanita muscaria mushrooms in 2025. With this uptick in modern cultural adoption of this ancient psychoactive fungus, the focus is now shifting towards separating quality producers and vendors from the unscrupulous cash grabbers making questionable ‘Amanita’ products given its reputation as a ‘legal magic mushroom’.

Healing Herbals has a stellar track record and does public education and outreach about their products, including joining me on a recent Mycopreneur Podcast to show their process for making Amanita tinctures. Founder Robert Lattig about his trip to South Africa to set up a cultivation facility the company leased in partnership with their sourcing agents for exotic ethnobotanicals in the country. In an evolving landscape of mushroom and ethnobotanical supplement producers, Healing Herbals is staking their reputation to quality and transparency.

A recent Washington Post article which I refute claims that “People have no idea what’s in these Amanita products'“ — this is categorically false in regards to ethical purveyors like Healing Herbals, who include laboratory COA’s from industry heavyweight ACS Labs with each of their products.

The PsiloSoma Project is a research endeavor aimed at documenting the global distribution of native magic mushroom species including local strains and uses in regions around the world. The project has largely focused on the Mediterranean region over the past year, where traditional and scientific knowledge of psilocybin mushrooms is largely unknown to the broader world. This project is led by Dr. Fabio Mao Malletta and signals the growing importance of independent mycological research anchored with rigorous scientific protocols and reporting standards to fill in some of the many gaps regarding mushroom knowledge around the world.

The map directly below is the most up to date example of magic mushroom distribution globally; compare this map with famed ethnomycologist Gaston Guzman’s previous effort to chart the worldwide distribution of psilocybin-containing species in 1983 below.

The Fungi Consultant is the brainchild of British mycophile Oli Genn-Bash and seeks to bridge the gap between traditional fungal wisdom and modern understandings of wellness. This gap is increasingly noticeable in public discourse; some ideological camps value Randomized Controlled Trials as ‘The Gold Standard’ of evidence-based medicine, while another camp places more emphasis and legitimacy on traditional knowledge systems that center millennia of human experience and folk medicine. The world of functional mushrooms represents an opportunity to work towards integrating the best of traditional ancestral practices with modern scientific research, and the Fungi Consultant is positioned at the vanguard of this synthesis.

The Fungi Consultant offers one on one and group consultations helping to demystify and personalize functional mushrooms for each client, helping to cut through the considerable noise and misinformation that people unfamiliar with mushrooms face when looking to add them to their lives. Even within the mushroom community and industry there are many misunderstandings and disagreements about best practices for getting the most bang for your buck — or British Pound — from a mushroom wellness protocol, and so the advocacy and consultations from The Fungi Consultant are all the more important in advancing our collective understanding of mushroom medicine.

Look out for a forthcoming collaboration between The Fungi Consultant x Mycopreneur that is set to be publicly announced in the near future 👀

The Amanita Festival is a testament to the growing popularity and global power of mushrooms to attract people all over the world. The first edition of the festival launched in November of 2024 and it’s set to return for the third consecutive year November 20-24 in Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina.

Over 2,000 people attended the last version of this festival, which featured 30 + DJ’s and bands in addition to a host of mushroom workshops and vendor booths, etc. This festival also represents the growing shift away from hegemony in the global north regarding mushroom entrepreneurship as more and more ventures are launching in non-english speaking places geared towards local benefit rather than multinational corporate structuring IMO.

Real Mushrooms are leaders in the functional mushroom market with over thirty years of experience pioneering the space. The company recently acquired the legacy brand Mushroom Science, doubling down on the two brands collective efforts to advance the conversation around accurate labeling in the mushroom supplement category.

As many people are beginning to learn, there is a unique debacle in the functional mushroom supplement space where a number of brands use mycelium on grain for their supplements while labeling them as ‘mushrooms’. As Real Mushrooms CEO Skye Chilton says:

“It's not an issue in the grocery store. 

It's not an issue in psychedelics. 

It's not an issue when you're foraging in the woods. 

Yet for some reason, "mushroom" does not mean mushroom when it comes to fungi based ingredients that go into your favorite supplements, foods and beverages.”

Real Mushrooms has joined industry heavyweight Nammex in renewing their call to the FDA for Functional Fungi Product Labeling Accuracy in response to the formation of the North American Functional Mushroom Council marketing group that is ironically composed primarily of representatives of companies selling fermented mycelium.

For those unfamiliar with the nuance between products made with mushrooms vs. mycelium, I invite you to inspect the two images below and select which one is a mushroom

Please check back next week for our final installment of “26 Mushroom Companies to Watch in 2026’

Okay, so the press is definitely stretching this one a bit, but what else is new? British Prime Minister Keir Starmer at Yi Zuo Yi Wang in downtonw Beijing, China this week. The restaurant is world-renowned for their fungi delicacies, including a cooked version of the Lanmoa asiatica mushroom that is rapidly growing in its global profile for its purported ability to cause those who consume it to see ‘tiny people’ due to unknown psychoactive compounds within the mushroom. The irony here is that the mushroom loses this ability when cooked, meaning that Keir & co. were probably not hallucinating Lilliputian archetypes with their gracious hosts. I made a satirical skit about this occasion on the Mycopreneur Instagram page this week in which Starmer ate the mushrooms and say ‘little people’, or as he refers to the little people, ‘tax paying middle class citizens’

The New York Times ran an interesting article on the seemingly now ubiquitous Functional Mushroom Gummy category that has been taking over in the U.S.

The reviewer purchased a major brand called WonderDay mushroom Gummies made by Plant People, a brand I’ve quite honestly never heard of but which apparently is available at Whole Foods, Target, Sprouts, and new age hipster holy grail retailer Erewhon.

The reviewer states that they felt no noticeable effect in regards to the focus / energy / balance / mood claims made on the product label, stating

“Strip away all the confused science and all the mushroom lore, though — the abundant stories, the myths, the longtime thematic associations that are hard for the gullible consumer brain to shake — and you are still left with some very clever marketing.”

This issue around commercialization of and capitalization upon the growing public appetite for mushrooms and natural wellness warrants increased scrutiny as many brands will put their resources towards branding and marketing before crafting a sound mushroom supplement that draws from the well-established foundation of mushroom science and traditional healing protocols — someone tap in The Fungi Consultant on this one.

Leading MycoMaterials manufacturer MycoWorks is entering a new chapter via strategic restructuring via acquisition by DFX Corp with designs to accelerate the growth of the “$300 million global brand built at the intersection of innovation, sustainability, and craftsmanship”

MycoWorks recently closed it’s manufacturing facility in South Carolina in October 2025 as ‘cheaper mycelium sources exist’ — what these recent developments means for the future of the brand and the category they helped put on the map in a big way is yet to be written, but there’s a case to be made that this restructuring is emblematic of a potential principle in mycopreneurship that sees diminishing returns at a certain point of scale; while infinite growth and global domination are the game plan of companies that reach a certain size and scale, there is a lot of evidence to suggest that mushroom innovation is best suited to supporting a larger number of smaller players than a fewer number of global behemoths. Clearly this is just my perspective, but it’s one we’ve also seen play out in a major way in the psychedelic mushroomspace over the last decade.

The Mycopreneur Incubator is our weekly low-key, cost free networking and acceleration hub for mushroom entrepreneurs, researchers, and the mycocurious.

Jason has over a decade of experience running a mushroom business and today we’ll discuss mushroom extraction and the day to day realities of structuring and scaling a viable mushroom company. Invite to our Zoom today is directly below the image here.

Lastly, check out the upcoming Laughter Is Medicine mushroom retreat I’m co-hosting in Jamaica at the stunning Coral Cove Wellness Resort March 15-20 with an afterparty March 20-22. We’ve already booked out a solid core group of participants and have a number of spots remaining — this retreat will sell out and there’s truly been nothing like it before.

Coral Cove has a private beach and 5 star Farm to Table Dining, and the retreat activities include one high dose mushroom experience and another low dose ‘mushroom enhanced play day’. We have standup comedy, live music, kayaking, a visit to a globally prolific cannabis farm nearby, and much more on the docket for this inaugural retreat in collaboration with Sacred Paths Retreats. We’re offering $500 off for Early Bird bookings through February 14th. Don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions and I’m available for one on one calls if you’d like to discuss your participation or ask any questions before booking.

Thanks for reading the Mycopreneur Newsletter and see you at the Incubator today

DW