What Does MycoProtein Mean?

The short version: MycoProtein is protein made with fungi, not protein with mushroom powder mixed in. Ours starts as plant protein, gets fermented by mushroom roots (mycelium), and then gets four more mushrooms. Five mushrooms in every scoop.

That's the elevator pitch. The longer story has 1960s food scientists, a soil sample, a 300-year-old Indonesian food, and five mushrooms that each look like they came from a different planet. Pour a coffee. It takes about six minutes.

Where the word comes from

"Myco" comes from mykes, the Greek word for fungus. You've seen it in mycology (the study of fungi) and mycelium (the web of root-like threads a mushroom grows from). Put it in front of "protein" and you get exactly what it sounds like: protein made with fungi.

A fun fact while we're here: fungi aren't plants. Scientists actually place them closer to animals than to plants on the tree of life. They don't make their own food from sunlight. They grow, digest and recycle, which is what makes them so good at fermentation.

Mushroom vs. mycelium: what's the difference?

Think of an apple tree. The apple is the part you see and pick, but the tree is what's doing the living. Mushrooms work the same way.

• The mushroom is the fruit. It pops up above ground (or out of a log) to spread spores.
• The mycelium is the organism itself: a network of fine white threads called hyphae, running through soil, wood or whatever the fungus is growing on.

When we say our protein is fermented with Shiitake mycelium, we mean that living network of threads does the work, the same part of the fungus that's been making foods like tempeh for centuries.

A quick history of mycoprotein

In the 1960s, food scientists were worried the world was heading for a protein shortage. A British food company, Rank Hovis McDougall, went looking for new sources. In 1967, their search turned up a promising microfungus in a soil sample.

After a roughly ten-year review, it was approved for sale in the UK in 1985 and became the meat alternative Quorn. It reached the U.S. in 2002. For a long time, "mycoprotein" meant that one food.

Today the word covers a growing group of foods made by growing or fermenting with fungi. ChagaRoot MycoProtein is one of them, but it isn't a meat alternative and it isn't made the same way. It's a protein powder built from plant protein and mushrooms.

People have been cooking with fungi for a long time

Fermenting food with fungi sounds new. It's actually one of the oldest tricks in the kitchen:

• Bread and beer. Yeast is a fungus. If you've had a sandwich, you've eaten something made with fungi.
• Tempeh. Made on the Indonesian island of Java since at least the 1700s. A fungal culture grows its white mycelium right through cooked soybeans and knits them into a firm cake. It's probably the closest cousin to what we do.
• Miso, soy sauce and sake. All made with koji, a mold that has been used in Japanese and Chinese kitchens for well over a thousand years.
• Cheese. The blue in blue cheese and the soft white rind on Brie are both fungi.

In every case, a living culture changes the food it works on: its flavor, its texture, sometimes its whole form. We use the same idea to build mushrooms into the protein itself.

How ChagaRoot MycoProtein is made

1. Start with plant protein. Pea protein and rice protein. Nothing exotic yet.
2. Let Shiitake mycelium ferment it. Shiitake mycelium is added and goes to work on the protein, a lot like a starter does for sourdough bread. The mushroom becomes part of the protein instead of sitting next to it.
3. Add four more mushrooms. Lion's Mane, Reishi, Turkey Tail and Chaga join in, for five mushrooms in every scoop, all 100% sourced in the USA.

Other brands add mushrooms to protein. We ferment protein with mushrooms. That's the whole idea in one sentence.

Why pea and rice?

Protein is built from amino acids, and your body needs nine "essential" ones from food. Plant proteins usually come up short on one or two:

• Pea protein is rich in lysine but lower in methionine.
• Rice protein is the opposite: lower in lysine, richer in methionine.

Put them together and they fill each other's gaps. That's why MycoProtein is a complete protein with a PDCAAS score of 1.0.

PDCAAS stands for Protein Digestibility-Corrected Amino Acid Score. It's the protein-quality yardstick the FDA adopted in 1993, and it tops out at 1.0. For comparison, a common published score for pea protein on its own is about 0.89, and rice is about 0.50. Whey also scores 1.0.

Meet the five mushrooms

Shiitake. The one doing the fermenting. Shiitake has been cultivated for about 800 years, with the earliest written record from China in 1209. In the wild it grows on fallen hardwood like oak and chestnut, and today it makes up roughly a quarter of all the mushrooms grown in the world.

Lion's Mane. Looks less like a mushroom and more like a white pom-pom or a frozen waterfall, with long shaggy spines instead of a cap. It grows on hardwood trees.

Reishi. A glossy, reddish-brown shelf mushroom that looks like it's been lacquered. It's tough and woody, which is why you'll find it dried and powdered rather than sliced into a stir-fry. It shows up again and again in East Asian art and tradition.

Turkey Tail. Named for its thin, fan-shaped caps striped in browns, tans and blues, just like a turkey's tail feathers. You've probably walked right past it on a fallen log.

Chaga. Our namesake, and the strangest of the bunch. Chaga grows mostly on birch trees in cold northern forests and looks like a lump of burnt charcoal on the bark. It isn't a mushroom cap at all. It's a dense mass of mycelium. For centuries people have grated it and brewed it into a dark, earthy tea.

What's in a scoop

• 20g of plant protein in Chocolate, 19g in Vanilla, per 2-scoop serving
• A complete protein, with a PDCAAS (Protein Digestibility-Corrected Amino Acid Score) of 1.0, the highest score possible
• Five mushrooms: Shiitake, Lion's Mane, Reishi, Turkey Tail and Chaga, all 100% USA-sourced
• Sweetened only with monk fruit and allulose. No stevia, no sucralose, no added sugar and no artificial sweeteners.
• Vegan, gluten free and non-GMO

About those sweeteners: monk fruit is a small round melon from southern China, and allulose is a rare sugar found naturally in small amounts in foods like figs and raisins. Those two are the whole sweetener list.

Common questions

Is it the same as Quorn?
No. Quorn is a meat alternative made from a different fungus grown in large tanks. ChagaRoot MycoProtein is a protein powder: plant protein fermented with Shiitake mycelium, plus four more mushrooms.

Is it just protein powder with mushroom powder stirred in?
No, and that's the whole point. Shiitake mycelium ferments the protein itself. The four other mushrooms are added after.

Is mycelium a mushroom?
It's the same organism. The mushroom is the fruit, and the mycelium is the network of threads it grows from.

Is it vegan?
Yes. Fungi aren't animals (even if they're closer cousins than plants are). MycoProtein is vegan, gluten free and non-GMO.

How people use it

Shake it with milk, blend it into a smoothie, stir it into overnight oats, froth it into coffee for a mocha, or bake it into pancakes and muffins. A few favorites to start with: Protein Pumpkin Muffins, Protein Hot Cocoa, or browse all our recipes.

Want to see it side by side with whey, plant and pea protein? Here's how MycoProtein compares. Ready to try it? Shop MycoProtein in Chocolate or Vanilla.