The Mushroom Index
How fast functional mushrooms are actually growing
Most "market reports" on this category cost a few thousand euros, run to two hundred pages, and end in a CAGR nobody can check. We built the same story from three public data sets instead: what people search for, what scientists publish, and what is actually legal to sell as a supplement in the EU. All information is free and sourced.
The category is not cooling off
Google Trends measures how a search term's popularity moves over time, worldwide, indexed to its own peak. It cannot tell you sales, but it is the closest thing to a live read on genuine curiosity, and it cannot be bought or gamed by a brand's marketing budget. Here is where nine functional mushroom terms stood in 2018 against where they stand now.
Every single one of these nine terms moved up over the period. Not one went down, and chaga, already a well-known search term back in 2018, still grew from a much higher starting point than the others.
The science did not stay still either
Search interest can be a mood. Peer-reviewed publishing is slower to move and much harder to fake. We counted every paper on PubMed with each species' scientific name in the title or abstract, by year, from 2015 to 2025.
| Species | 2015 papers | 2025 papers |
|---|---|---|
| Lion's Mane (Hericium erinaceus) | 30 | 85 |
| Reishi (Ganoderma lucidum) | 129 | 275 |
| Chaga (Inonotus obliquus) | 20 | 42 |
| Cordyceps | 125 | 220 |
| Turkey Tail (Trametes versicolor) | 59 | 73 |
| Shiitake (Lentinula edodes) | 33 | 102 |
| Maitake (Grifola frondosa) | 18 | 31 |
Two signals that don't talk to each other, pointing the same way
Search behavior comes from millions of anonymous people typing into Google. Peer-reviewed publishing comes from research institutions with no idea what anyone is searching for. Neither one is trying to sell anything. When both move up, together, for every species we checked, over the same decade, that is worth paying attention to.
It does not prove any single health claim, and we are not going to pretend it does. What it shows is that the interest is real, not manufactured, and that the science is not sitting still while the wellness industry runs ahead of it. Both are moving. That is the honest version of the story.
The EU Novel Food status of functional mushrooms, in plain English
We learned this one the hard way. Turkey Tail is classified as a novel food in the EU, which caused a payments provider to flag our store and forced us to reformulate a product line in 2026. The European Commission's own Novel Food status catalogue is accurate, but it is split across a searchable database, a consultation table, and a PDF regulation, and it is written for regulatory affairs teams, not for a small producer trying to figure out what they can legally sell. So we pulled together the plain-English version.
| Species | As fruiting body extract | As dehydrated mycelium powder |
|---|---|---|
| Lion's Mane | Not novel food | Novel food |
| Reishi | Not novel food | Novel food |
| Maitake | Not novel food | Novel food |
| Shiitake | Not novel food | Novel food |
| Chaga | Not novel food in supplements | Novel food as the raw species |
| Turkey Tail | Novel food, not authorised — flagged in an EU food safety alert in late 2025. This is the one we hit ourselves. | |
The short version: if you are selling a fruiting-body extract of Lion's Mane, Reishi, Maitake, Shiitake or Chaga in the EU, you are almost certainly fine. The moment mycelium powder or Turkey Tail enters the formula, get a straight answer before you launch, not after.
Methodology and sources
- Search interest: Google Trends, worldwide, monthly data averaged to a yearly figure, each term indexed independently to its own peak (2018 or 2026 to date). Pulled via the Trends API, July 2026.
- Publication counts: PubMed / NCBI E-utilities, title/abstract search on each species' scientific name, full calendar years 2015 through 2025. Pulled directly from the NCBI API, July 2026.
- EU Novel Food status: European Commission Novel Food status catalogue and consultation process table, cross-checked against a 2025 RASFF notification for Turkey Tail. Reviewed July 2026.
We plan to refresh this page quarterly. If you spot a source that has changed or a status that is out of date, tell us and we will fix it.
We built this because we wanted the real numbers for ourselves, not because we needed a page to sell from. If you want to see what actually growing these mushrooms on a farm in Portugal has taught us, our Learn Hub is a better place to start than this page.