What is in an Amanita gummy? The label and the laboratory

A mushroom has no ingredient list

Nobody asks what is in a mushroom. The question turns up the moment the mushroom has been made into something else - pressed into a gummy, poured into a chocolate bar, rolled into a cone - because a manufactured product carries a list, and a list is a statement about contents that somebody can go and check.

In 2024 somebody did. What the checking found is why this article exists, and it does not run the way people assume it will. The usual worry about an edible sold as amanita is that there is hardly any mushroom in it. The documented case is the other way round.

Diamond Shruumz, and what the testing found

In June 2024 Prophet Premium Blends recalled everything it made under the Diamond Shruumz name: Infused Cones, Chocolate Bars and Gummies, every flavour and every lot.

Then the samples went to a laboratory. FDA testing found muscimol - the compound this species is known for - in nine of the chocolate bar samples and in infused cones as well, and found both muscimol and ibotenic acid in a raw ingredient used to make some of the products. The labels declared none of it. The same testing identified a synthetic analogue of psilocybin, the prescription anticonvulsant pregabalin, and kava. The Blue Ridge Poison Center at the University of Virginia ran a separate test on five brands of mushroom gummies bought in Central Virginia gas stations and smoke shops. Three of the five held psilocybin or psilocin, and no label said so.

The federal count runs to 31 October 2024: 180 illnesses across 34 states, 73 hospitalizations and three potentially associated deaths. Reported symptoms included seizures, loss of consciousness and abnormal heart rates.

Read it as a labelling story, because that is what it is. A wrapper said one thing. The contents were several other things, and nobody holding the packet had any way to tell which.

Why the label and the contents drift apart

Amanita muscaria cannot be cultivated. It is mycorrhizal, alive only in partnership with the roots of living trees, so there is no farm to order from: every cap is gathered wild, in autumn, inside a window a few weeks wide. Wild material varies from cap to cap and site to site, and turning material that varies into an extract that does not is both difficult and expensive.

So the trade took the cheaper road. A good deal of what is sold as amanita is made with laboratory-synthesised muscimol rather than with mushroom. On its own that is not a scandal - a synthesised compound is a known quantity, which is rather the point of synthesising it. It is simply a different object from the one pictured on the front of the packet, and the packet seldom says which of the two you are holding.

What a packet can tell you

The name on the front is marketing. The ingredient list is the regulated part, and regulation only does its work when somebody audits it. The testing came last and it was the only part anybody verified, which is why the first two stayed quiet about most of what the third turned up.

The FDA’s own line on amanita as food

In December 2024 the FDA wrote to industry to say that Amanita muscaria, its extracts and certain of its constituents are not authorised for use as ingredients in conventional food.

That is awkward reading for anyone selling amanita chocolate. It is not awkward here, because it is the position this shop already held. We have never sold this mushroom as food and we do not sell it to be taken. It is a botanical specimen for collection and study, which is what every page of this site says and what is printed on the pouch. The Canadian half of the question - whether it is legal to buy Amanita muscaria in Canada, and on what terms - has a page of its own.

No microdosing products, and no prepared ones

People arrive here looking for amanita microdosing, and the answer is the same every time: there is none. No microdosing range, no fly agaric microdosing kit, no capsules, no gummies, no extract, no tincture, nothing dosed or portioned.

The reason is a line in law rather than a matter of taste. A prepared product made to be taken is a different thing from a botanical specimen, and the specimen is what this shop sells. Selling microdosing Amanita muscaria would put us under rules written for food and for natural health products, with the approvals and the licence that go with them, and we are neither licensed for that nor willing to pretend otherwise.

So there is no method here and no amount, and the question does not get a different answer by email. Why the shop refuses in both directions, rather than hinting, is set out at length on the specimen page.

What is in the pouch

One thing.

Whole wild caps out of the Coast Mountains of British Columbia, picked one at a time at first light, brushed rather than washed, parted from their stems, dried in moving air and cured in the dark before the seal goes on. The second form is those same caps stone-milled: a change of grind, not a change of substance. Nothing is added and nothing is taken out, no part of it was made in a laboratory, and there is no second ingredient to declare.

A one-line ingredient list is easy to write and worth nothing on its own. What makes it worth something is that every step behind it happened in one place, on named ground, in one autumn, with the day itself on film. That is what the dried fly agaric caps we have for sale are, and the rest of the shop is the same harvest milled.

What to ask about any packet

The question worth putting to an amanita product is not what the front of it says but what a laboratory would find inside. The one time a laboratory was asked that at scale, the answer came back with several compounds the wrapper had never mentioned, and the people holding those wrappers had bought them in good faith. We are not in that trade at all. This is a mushroom, dried, in a bag, described by what it is.

Botanical specimen · not for consumption · 19+. This article is about the contents of packages and the public record of a recall; it makes no claim about what any of it does, and fresh Amanita muscaria is toxic.