Powdered mushrooms are being touted as an elixir of life. Now M&S has jumped on the bandwagon

Telegraph

30-04-2025

They are said to improve focus, enhance relaxation and even do wonders for your skin. Perhaps it is little wonder, then, that the likes of Marks & Spencer and pop star Ellie Goulding are muscling in on the latest supplement craze – ' functional mushrooms '.
Demand for the mushrooms – which sellers and wellness influencers claim provide a range of health benefits beyond mere nutrition – is booming, with the market already worth billions of pounds.
Species including lion's mane, cordyceps, turkey tail and chaga are among those touted as offering transformational results, supposedly helping to alleviate stress, fatigue and anxiety.
Seemingly keen not to miss out on the buzz, M&S has become the 'first' to sell an own-label range of this kind – named 'YAY! Mushrooms' – with fungi varieties appearing in nine products including powders, canned vanilla lattes and 'cold pressed dosing shots'.
It will count a number of A-listers among its competitors, including Goulding. The singer, who performed at the Prince and Princess of Wales's wedding, has launched 'Everystate', a range of ground fungi blends (which are to be mixed with water and drank) that will be stocked at the likes of Daylesford.
She joins the likes of Gillian Anderson, whose 'G Spot' drinks line features cordyceps and chaga; Gisele Bundchen, an ambassador for Gaia Herbs (which sells lion's mane supplements), Bear Grylls – backer of mushroom beverage brand 'DIRTEA' – Jo Wood, whose eponymous organic range includes turkey tail tablets, and Patrick Schwarzenegger, who offers up fungi-laden 'MOSH' protein bars.
The ingredients' A-list cachet is such that searches for 'functional' mushrooms – a term used to denote health benefits that transcend nutrition – are up a third on last year, says Blanca Spencer Moreno, Ocado's healthy lifestyles buyer. Numbers of those seeking lion's mane mushrooms have swelled by 252 per cent over the same period. 'In response to this increase in customer interest, we have increased our range by over 50 per cent in the last six months,' Spencer Moreno says.
While the craze is new, the use of mushrooms as a wellness product is anything but.
Used in ancient medicine for thousands of years (around 450 BCE, Hippocrates identified that the amadou mushroom could reduce inflammation; Chinese medical texts dating back to 206BC highlight reishi as an anti-ageing tonic), wellness brands tout their ability to restore focus and relieve stress. All can be eaten, though supplements can provide more concentrated amounts of the desired compounds than if you were to slice them into a stroganoff.
Though the buzz is fervent – the global adaptogenic mushroom market hit £23.7 billion in 2023, according to Grand View Research, and is expected to rise by a further 11.2 per cent each year to 2030 – human data remains limited. A Northumbria University study of 41 adults in 2023, for instance, showed that lion's mane (or Hericium erinaceus) 'may improve speed of performance and reduce subjective stress in healthy, young adults' – but concluded that 'it is crucial that further investigation is conducted employing larger sample sizes'. Some compounds, such as PSK (or polysaccharide-K, present in turkey tail) are used as an adjunct cancer treatment to chemotherapy in Japan, though have yet to become a mainstream fixture elsewhere. Lion's mane, reishi, chaga, turkey tail and cordyceps have never featured in any medicines licensed in the UK.
'The evidence behind lion's mane and reishi mushrooms is pretty shaky,' says Dr Emily Leeming, a nutritionist and author of Genius Gut: the Life-Changing Science of Eating for Your Second Brain. 'A very small handful of studies hint that lion's mane might help with mood or focus, but they're poorly designed, only done in a small number of people, and very likely affected by the placebo effect.'
The same is true of reishi, she adds. 'Most of the hype is around supporting the immune system, and potential cancer benefits come from lab and animal studies, not strong human research. These mushrooms may have mild effects, but the claims are way ahead of the science – we need much better research first.'
Last year, Which?, the consumer advocacy group, ranked functional mushrooms on a list of 'health products you don't need' – but that hasn't affected their market hype. You can buy 51 lion's mane products at Holland & Barrett, from coffee to ginger shots and capsules; 38 cite reishi.
Jewellery designer Ruth Mary Chipperfield had never heard of lion's mane until last year, when 'it was recommended to me by a nutritionist. I was a bit dubious but thought I would give it a go.' Taking one to two 1000mg tablets on work days left the 35-year-old feeling a 'fair amount calmer and able to focus better', and reduced her anxiety and restlessness. She has since switched from tablets to powder, which she mixes with water, and adds that the overall results have been 'life-changing', because 'all these little adjustments really add up… By investing in my health, it's an investment in my business. I would say it has given me an extra hour's worth of productivity a day.'
Many of the products sold only contain minimal amounts of the fungi plastered across their packaging (a 2017 study showed that of 19 'reishi' products being sold in the US, only a quarter of the ingredients actually matched what was in the label).
But to many, that doesn't matter, says Tom Baxter, the founder of the Bristol Fungarium, which farms, researches and sells mushrooms. 'The placebo is a real thing. And if people buy it believing Ellie Goulding, or [believing] that it's going to help them, 30 per cent of the time, people probably will get some benefit from it.' (Studies have suggested that the placebo effect can improve outcomes for certain medical conditions around one third of the time.)
This is 'one of the reasons why the supplement industry is a bit of a winner', he adds of a market that is set to near-double within the decade. Useful for their coffers too is that mushroom supplements are far easier for our bodies to break down than if we were to grind and consume them ourselves, he says, as 'the vast majority of those compounds are just going to pass straight through you'.
While Baxter, who founded his Somerset business in 2019, firmly believes in the potential health benefits of mushrooms, he acknowledges that there is still much to learn. 'We're trying to find out what the evidence is, what compounds are responsible for the outcomes that people are seeing and counting how many of those [compounds] we have in our products in order to get some vague idea on whether or not we're snake oil salesmen,' he says.
Bristol Fungarium grows more than two and a half tonnes of mushrooms a month, with half of their revenue coming from lion's mane products. 'We're personally seeing maybe 50 per cent year-on-year growth, over the last few years, without any advertising spend,' says Baxter. This year, they are on track for over £2 million in sales.
He acknowledges there is a 'false equivalence' that is 'slightly hazardous' between pharmaceutical-grade mushroom compounds and pastel-hued wellness products.
Still, the trend shows no sign of slowing. Like turmeric and matcha lattes before them, mushrooms are already appearing in skincare lines, across hipster café menus and ready-to-drink cans, with more marketing opportunities inevitably on the horizon.
'We anticipate that customer demand for functional mushrooms will continue to grow and this is driving increased innovation within the space, with the emergence of many interesting new products and producers across different categories,' says Spencer Moreno. 'We're actively expanding our range at Ocado to include more products and formats, to meet this evolving customer need.'
Expect a permanent slot in the chilled aisle at Pret and a Dubai chocolate -style mushroom bar on shelves near you soon.