Our extraction method
Kanzen完全
Japanese for complete.
- Six weeks, not two days
- Low and slow. Never above 38°C.
- The whole mushroom, and nothing else
Most mushroom brands do not use the mushroom
They use the root - the mycelium - grown on grain, then milled with the grain still in it. It is faster, it is cheaper, and it is not the mushroom.
We only ever use the fruiting body.
Every method has a name. They all mean faster.
Dual extraction. You will see it on every label in this category, and it sounds like a standard.
It is not. It describes which solvents touch the mushroom - water, then alcohol. That is all it says. It tells you nothing about how hot the process ran, or how long it took. Which is where an extract is actually won or lost.
Look past the label at how it is actually done, and the language changes but the ambition does not. Ultrasonic-assisted extraction. Microwave-assisted extraction. Serious names for a single goal: get more out, sooner. Both are measured in yield per hour, and both work by driving energy into the mushroom to force it open faster.
That is this industry in one sentence. Every method it has bothered to name is a method for going quicker.
Our head grower Wouter has spent years inside these facilities - in Japan, in China, across the industry - working out how everyone else does it. What he found is remarkably consistent: around eighty degrees, seven hours, the whole thing finished in two days.
At that temperature the most delicate compounds are gone before the alcohol ever arrives. You extracted twice. You saved very little.
We use water and alcohol too. The difference is that we are not trying to be quick. That is the lesson Wouter brought back from Japan, and it is the one thing in this whole business nobody has found a shortcut for. Good things take time.
The people who have been doing it longest do it slowest
In Japan, growing and extracting functional mushrooms is a craft centuries in the making. They have taken it further than anyone, and the reason is not better equipment.
It is that the standard was set long before anyone thought to measure a batch in hours. Nobody was optimising for throughput, because there was nothing to optimise against. What they were left with is the version of the process that produces the best result rather than the quickest one - and it has had several hundred years of refinement since.
Wouter has spent more than fifteen years learning those methods there and bringing them home. Not importing the mushrooms. Importing the knowledge.
Kanzen 完全 is what came back
Japanese patience, European standards. Here is what that means in practice.
- 38°CNever above
Body temperature. Low enough that the compounds we are trying to keep are never put at risk in the first place.
- 6 weeksNot two days
The cell walls open gradually. Nothing is forced, so nothing is broken getting out.
- 100%The whole mushroom
Nothing is stripped out, so nothing has to be added back.
Side by side
| The usual method | Kanzen 完全 | |
|---|---|---|
| Temperature | Around 80°C | Never above 38°C |
| Duration | About two days | Six weeks |
| Part of the mushroom used | Often mycelium, grain included | Fruiting body only |
| After processing | Carriers added back - maltodextrin, anti-caking agents, silica | Nothing added |
| What you are told | Dual extraction | The temperature and the time |
Japanese method. European rules.
We grow on our own farm in Flevoland, to the methods Wouter brought back, under strict European standards.
Controlling every stage - cultivation, harvest, extraction - is rare in this industry. It is also the only way to know that what is on the certificate is what is in the pouch.
And it runs the other way too. Six weeks of doing as little as possible to a mushroom is only worth the trouble if the mushroom was worth protecting. Kanzen 完全 does not improve what comes off the farm. It refuses to damage it.
So the substrate we mix ourselves, the pasteurisation we hold below sterilising, and the used substrate that goes back onto a neighbour's field are not a separate story from this one. They are the first half of it.
7
Every batch is tested on seven biomarkers
A Certificate of Analysis comes with every batch, from an independent laboratory. Not a summary of it - the certificate.
It tells you what is in the pouch: the actives, the purity, the contaminant screens. Take it and compare it against anyone else's.
What it does not show is the six weeks or the 38°C. A certificate measures what came out, not how it was made - so those two numbers are ours to state and yours to hold us to. We would rather say that plainly than let a lab report imply something it does not cover.