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New Report from MUSHEEZ® Challenges Mushroom Extract Industry to Embrace Real Transparency

MUSHEEZ® has just released its first in-depth industry report — Elevating Mushroom Extract Quality: A Science-Driven Approach to Transparency and Efficacy. Aimed at food supplement professionals, brand owners, and formulators, this 38-page document exposes the limitations of outdated testing metrics and makes the case for a shift to verified, compound-level analysis.

The report is the result of a nine-month investigation into the real-world quality of mushroom extracts on the European market. It outlines how traditional markers like “15:1 extraction ratio” or “30% beta-glucans” fail to tell us what really matters: the levels of bioactive compounds that actually drive efficacy.

“A high beta-glucan count tells you nothing about the presence of ganoderic acids or hericenones,” says Robin Gurney, Director at MUSHEEZ®. “We realised that without independent testing, we were just guessing — and so is most of the industry.”

The report introduces MUSHEEZ®’s new testing methodology, combining nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) for species identity with liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry (LC-MS) for compound quantification. Using these techniques, the company analysed both its own products and commercial extracts from other suppliers. The results were sobering — some products contained only trace amounts of the key bioactive compounds of interest.

The report features:

A breakdown of shared and species-specific compounds of interest
Side-by-side test data from extracts on the EU market
A critique of misleading industry terms like “full spectrum”
A call for open, verifiable documentation at batch level

This publication is less of a sales pitch and more of a challenge to the industry to raise the bar and stop hiding behind ratios and vague labels. As Gurney writes in the introduction, “If brands want consumers to take functional mushrooms seriously, it starts with showing them the data that matters.”

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