In 1776, a Scottish philosopher explained why most mushroom supplements do nothing in 2026

Maybe there's a jar in your cupboard you stopped taking.

Lion's Mane, perhaps. Or a mushroom blend with a beautiful label. You took it every day for a month, waited, and felt exactly the same.

Or maybe you've only seen the ads, and quietly filed mushrooms under hype.

Either way, it's a reasonable conclusion. And either way, you went back to what you knew. The second coffee at eleven. The third at three. And by Wednesday, that heavy, foggy feeling again.

I'd like to offer another explanation. You're right to be sceptical of it. You've heard "we're different" before, so I won't ask you to take my word for anything on this page. I'll show you where to check.

Here's the short version. In 2023, researchers in Italy tested 19 mushroom supplements from six companies.² Only 6 of the 19 contained the mushroom their label promised.

That isn't a mushroom problem. It isn't a you problem either. It's a division of labour problem. And the clearest explanation of it was written almost 250 years ago, about a workshop that made pins.

The rule that made everything cheap

In 1776 Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations. Near the very start, he describes a small workshop that makes pins.

Pins mattered then in a way that's hard to picture now. There were no zips and no safety pins. Dresses, shawls, collars and sleeves were pinned in place by hand every morning, and papers were pinned together instead of stapled. Every household went through them by the hundred, which is where the old phrase "pin money" comes from. A cheaper pin made daily life a little cheaper for almost everyone.

So how do you make something that small, cheaply, by the thousand? In Smith's workshop, nobody made a whole pin. One man draws out the wire. Another straightens it. A third cuts it, a fourth sharpens the point, a fifth grinds the top so a head will fit.

Ten workers, each doing one small step, could make "upwards of forty-eight thousand pins in a day." One man doing every step himself could certainly not make twenty. Perhaps not even one.

That idea built the modern world. It fuelled the industrial revolution. It's the reason a shirt costs less than lunch.

For pins, Smith was right.

The button police of Paris

Not everyone welcomed the new way.

In the late 1690s, buttons in France were made by hand, by a guild of craftsmen who controlled the trade. Then tailors started weaving buttons from the same cloth as the coat. Faster, and far cheaper.

The guild fought back. France fined anyone who made, sold or even wore the new buttons. Guild wardens won the right to search people's homes and arrest anyone in the street wearing the wrong ones.

And still it didn't work. Within a few years, everyone in France was wearing the cheap cloth buttons.

About a century later, watching the old order of France collapse, the statesman Edmund Burke wrote a line that still gets quoted.

By chivalry, Burke didn't mean knights in armour. He meant the unwritten code the old world ran on: decency, loyalty, protecting the weak, and doing things properly because that was how they were done. In his eyes, that code was what held people together. The calculators replaced it with a simpler question. What does it cost?

The calculators won. Most of the time, they deserved to.

Keep the button makers in mind, though. They come back later in this story, and it turns out they were half right.

We followed the rule too

Over the next two centuries, the pin factory became plain common sense. If a job can be split into steps, split it. If a step can be done somewhere cheaper, move it there.

Europe followed that rule almost all the way. Clothes. Electronics. Furniture. And mushrooms.

When we started Human Pro, we did the same.

It looked like the smart choice. A good price per kilo. A supplier who could deliver any volume we asked for.

Then we started asking harder questions. How high were the beta-glucan levels? Where in China were the mushrooms grown, and by whom? What happened to them before they were extracted?

Our supplier couldn't answer any of them. We'd simply have to take their word for it.

That isn't a criticism of Chinese mushrooms. Reishi, Cordyceps and Lion's Mane have been part of Chinese and Japanese tradition for centuries. The problem was never where they came from. It was how they were being made.

If you bought from us before 2023, you bought what almost everyone sells. That's exactly why we changed it. It cost us some margin. We'd make the same call again tomorrow.

Every step efficient, and nobody owns the end product

Every step on the left is efficient. Every step is optimised for its own cost.

Nobody in that chain is doing anything wrong. The grower hits his volume, the merchant hits his price, the extractor hits his two days. Each of them can point to the step before and the step after.

Call it the pin factory problem. When every step saves a little, what disappears is the one thing nobody in the chain can see. Researchers in Italy actually measured what disappears.

See what comes out of our route →

Only 6 of 19 mushroom supplements matched their label

The Italian study found three things.²

The researchers pointed out one more thing, almost in passing. Much of the raw material on the market is mycelium, because it grows faster and costs less than the mushroom itself.

That sentence deserves a moment.

Mushroom, or mycelium on grain?

Our mushrooms take about twelve weeks to grow.

Their root network, the mycelium, can be grown on a tray of rice or oats in a fraction of that time. Then the whole tray is ground into powder. Grain and all.

The label can still say Lion's Mane.

Here's why that matters. What you're paying for isn't the name on the label. It's what's inside the mushroom: beta-glucans, and in Reishi, compounds called triterpenes. They're what a lab measures to tell a good extract from a poor one.

You can't see them. You can't taste them. Brown powder looks like brown powder.

A pin is different. If one worker cuts a corner, the next worker notices the bent pin. In a mushroom supply chain, nobody downstream notices. Least of all you.

So if a jar did nothing for you, there's a fair question to ask before you give up on mushrooms for good.

Was it ever the mushroom on the label?

Here's how one customer put it after trying ours.

A mushroom becomes what it eats

There's a step that decides quality before the mushroom even exists, and almost nobody talks about it.

Mushrooms grow on substrate, the bed that feeds them. And a mushroom is closer to a sponge than a plant. It builds itself out of whatever it grows on, including things nobody meant to put there. Mushrooms are well known for taking up heavy metals from their growing bed.

So "what did it grow on?" is really a different question. What am I swallowing?

Making good substrate is the hardest and slowest job on a mushroom farm. Wouter estimates that only 10 to 20 percent of growers in Europe make their own. The rest buy it in from large factories and grow on much the same thing as everyone else.

In Japan, it's closer to 80 percent.

What we learned in Japan

This summer, Nils, Wouter and I went to Japan together, with a film crew and a translator.

In Nagano, we visited Pawafuru, a company that has been making mushroom products for more than forty years. Their Reishi doesn't grow on trees. They bury wooden logs under a layer of soil in greenhouses, and let nature do the rest.

When we arrived, the Reishi was just breaking through, a few centimetres out of the ground. The soil was dark and alive, with ants and insects everywhere. Exactly what you want to see on a farm like this.

On the outside of the building, on banners, they'd printed their ISO and GMP certification numbers. Most companies file certificates like that away. Pawafuru hangs them where anyone walking past can read them.

At another farm, a grower showed us his very first Cordyceps harvest. Wouter told him how he feeds our Cordyceps, partly with eggs from the chicken farm next door that can't be sold. Double yolks, mostly.

The Japanese growers were fascinated. Then they started sharing what they knew.

That's what the whole trip felt like. Japan has centuries of growing knowledge that hasn't reached Europe yet. Europe knows standardisation, testing, and exactly which compounds to aim for. Nobody we met was trying to do it faster. Everyone was trying to do it a little better tomorrow.

It made me think of the button makers again.

They were wrong to fight the future with fines and wardens. But they were right about one thing: some work shouldn't be done the cheapest way. My mistake had been the opposite of theirs. I'd assumed the pin factory was the right answer for everything.

That's what we brought home from Japan, and it's what we do now. Japanese patience for the steps that can't be rushed. European standards for everything else.

One farm. One name on every step.

Today every step happens in one place: our own farm in Flevoland, where Wouter moved his operation after leaving Amsterdam.

We make our own substrate from what the region already has. Sawdust and wood chips from nearby forests. Grain husks. Spent yeast from a brewery down the road. Those eggs from next door. The recipe changes per mushroom, because Cordyceps doesn't eat what Lion's Mane eats. We pasteurise it at 110 to 114°C, which is exactly where heat belongs: before anything grows.

We grow Lion's Mane, Reishi and Cordyceps ourselves, from incubation to harvest. One growing cycle takes about twelve weeks. We use the fruiting body only.

Chaga is the exception. It only grows wild, on birch trees in cold northern forests, and it can't be grown on a farm the way the others can. So we buy it raw from Scandinavia (not China) and extract it ourselves in Flevoland.

Not every harvest makes it. Mushrooms are sensitive. A heat wave, a power cut or a swing in humidity can throw off a whole grow. When that happens, that harvest doesn't become extract.

Remember the last line on the left of that chain? Nobody responsible for what ends up in your pouch.

Here, if something is wrong with a batch, it's Wouter's phone that rings.

Time instead of heat

You already know this idea from your kitchen. Olive oil can be cold-pressed, or it can be heated and refined. Both bottles say olive oil. Nobody thinks they're the same thing.

Mushroom extracts are similar. The fast route uses heat, around 80°C, because heat is quick. The whole batch is done in two days.

We use time instead. We call our method Kanzen 完全, Japanese for complete.

The mushrooms spend six weeks in water and alcohol, never above 38°C. That's barely warmer than your own body. Water draws out the beta-glucans. Alcohol reaches what water can't, like the triterpenes in Reishi. Heat would make it faster. Time lets it happen on the mushroom's terms.

Nothing is added back afterwards.

See what six weeks at 38°C makes →

Don't take my word for it

Every batch is tested on our farm before it's released. The species. That it's the mushroom itself, not mycelium on grain. Heavy metals. Microbiology, including yeast and mould. Pesticides and contaminants, against EU limits. And beta-glucans.

Scan the QR code on your pack and you'll see the certificate for your own batch.

Then, so you don't have to take our own lab's word for it either, we have our results checked independently. The latest analysis by Eurofins, one of the world's largest testing laboratories, measured 42.9 percent beta-glucans in our Lion's Mane.³

Twenty batches to our one

Our way is slower, and it costs more. In the time the fast route finishes about twenty batches, we finish one.

Burke's calculators would call that a mistake. They'd be right. It's the one place in this business where we've decided to be inefficient on purpose.

It's also why our pouch costs more than one from a pin factory. You're not paying for the powder. You're paying for the six weeks.

And it puts a ceiling on how much we can make. Every batch sells out, and a new one always takes six weeks.

Before you give up on mushrooms for good

Here's what I'd ask you to consider.

The jar that did nothing may never have held the mushroom on its label. That's a different problem from mushrooms not working, and it has a different answer.

Whatever you decide about us, don't buy a mushroom supplement blind. Ask four questions first.

If there's one in your cupboard, go and check it.

Ours answers all four. See the offer →

What you'd be trying

Mushroom Essentials Complex is our daily blend. Lion's Mane, Cordyceps, Chaga and Reishi, grown and extracted the way I've described. Every daily serving holds 1,670 mg of mushroom extract, plus vitamin B3 (niacin), which contributes to normal psychological function and to the reduction of tiredness and fatigue.^*

Set your expectations properly. It's four capsules a day, because that's what it takes to hold 1,670 mg of extract. It isn't a stimulant, so it won't feel like a coffee. And it builds over a few weeks.

Plenty of people take it with their morning coffee. Some tell us they've gone from six cups a day to two.

It holds a 4.8 rating from more than 1,900 reviews. In a survey of 2,000 of our customers, 90 percent reported better focus and 74 percent better mental clarity.^†

1,71 € a day. Less than one of the coffees you might not need.

Here's how some of them put it.

Individual results vary.

Try it without paying twice

If you've already paid for a jar that did nothing, you shouldn't have to pay again just to find out whether this one is different.

★★★★★4.8 from 1,900+ reviews · 150,000+ customers

Mushroom Essentials Complex

Lion's Mane, Cordyceps, Chaga and Reishi. 1,670 mg of mushroom extract in every daily serving.

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Lion's Mane Cordyceps Chaga Reishi Vitamin B3

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Flow strong,
Gino
Co-founder, Human Pro

P.S. Smith's ten workers made 48,000 pins a day. Our extraction finishes one batch every six weeks. We think both numbers are exactly right. And if ours does nothing for you in 30 days, you get your money back. No questions asked.