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Fruiting body powder or extract?
"Extract" describes how the material was processed, and "fruiting body" describes which part of the fungus went in. A label can say either, both, or neither, and they answer different questions.
Updated October 2026
What an extract is
A whole powder is the dried mushroom, milled. An extract starts from that material and soaks it, in hot water, in alcohol, or in both one after the other, to pull certain compounds out of the cell walls. The liquid is then dried down to a powder. Hot water brings out the water-soluble beta-glucans and other polysaccharides; alcohol brings out the triterpenes that give Reishi its bitterness. A "dual extract" has been through both.
What stays behind is everything the solvent did not take: the fiber, the insoluble part of the cell wall, and whatever else was in the whole food. Some of that matters to the person eating it and some does not, which is why neither form is simply better.
What the ratio on the label means
A figure like "8:1" means eight kilograms of starting material went into one kilogram of extract. It says how much was concentrated. It does not say what was concentrated or from which part of the fungus. A high ratio from mycelium grown on grain is a concentrate of a material that was partly grain. The two questions to ask a label are still the same: which part, and, for an extract, how much of the compound you care about is actually stated.
| Compared on | Whole fruiting body powder | Extract |
|---|---|---|
| Processing | Dried and milled. | Soaked in water and/or alcohol, then dried down. |
| What is in it | The whole mushroom, fiber included. | The compounds the solvent took; the rest is left behind. |
| A serving | A tablespoon, a few grams. | Often under a gram, because it is concentrated. |
| What the label should state | Fruiting body, and ideally a beta-glucan figure. | Fruiting body or mycelium, the ratio, the solvent, and a beta-glucan or triterpene figure. |
| Cooking with it | Yes; it behaves like a spice. | Usually not; it is taken as a dose. |
When an extract is the better buy
If what you want is a measured amount of one compound family in a small daily dose, a well-labelled fruiting body extract does that more precisely than a spoon of powder. It also makes sense for a mushroom you would never eat as food; the traditional way to take Reishi is a long simmer, which is a hot-water extraction done at home. If you want the whole food, want to cook with it, or would rather pay for less processing, the whole powder is the better buy, and it is the one we make.
How to read a label for it
- Find the part first: "fruiting body" or "mycelium". If it is missing, the ratio cannot tell you.
- A ratio without a solvent named is half a fact. Water, alcohol, or dual.
- "Polysaccharides" is a broad word that includes starch from grain; "beta-glucans" is the specific one. Prefer a label that states beta-glucans as a percentage.
- For a whole powder, the useful numbers are the part and the weight in the container; the price per gram follows from those.
Where we stand
Our powders are the least processed version: 100% fruiting bodies, dried and milled, with no extracts and no additives, from mushrooms grown locally by growers we know. That is a choice about what a mushroom powder should be, and this page is here so you can make your own.
Fruiting body and mycelium on grain, powder and capsules, or see the powders.