Ryze Mushroom Coffee Review 2024

What…on earth…is mushroom coffee?  And why…would anyone…put it in their body?

Well, I’m going to answer all those questions because the answers are…

Well, it depends,…and because it’s healthy, and delicious (subjective).

So I’m going to convince you why you need to drink this stuff. 

Because it’s magic!…no not that kind of magic.

By the time you’re done reading.  I’m sure you’ll be just as irritated as I am when my next delivery is delayed for some unexplainable reason.  Damn you UPS!  Why can’t I buy this stuff on Amazon? Oh wait I can!

What is Ryze Mushroom Coffee?

Mushroom coffee can mean a couple of different things. But it generally isn’t coffee made from mushrooms like the name implies.  Rather it is usually a mix of mushroom powder or extract combined with coffee (usually instant) that can be mixed with water.

So generally when we say mushroom coffee, we’re talking about instant coffee with mushrooms in it.  

Ryze mushroom coffee is just that, a mushroom complex mixed with instant coffee.  But, before all you coffee snobs click away you’re going to want to stick around, we’ve got something for you.

Who Created Ryze Mushroom Coffee?

Ryze Superfoods is a small company founded in 2017 and headquartered in Boston by a couple of Harvard undergrads who shared a passion for keeping their minds and bodies healthy. The company specializes in mushroom-based mixes that you can drink.  They specialize in delivering some of the most health-promoting mushrooms into your diet through your regular habits (i.e. coffee drinking) or through other foods. Ever heard of mushroom gummies?

Top benefits of Ryze Mushroom Coffee

To really appreciate the benefits of Ryze mushroom coffee you need to understand the benefits of the individual mushrooms that they use in their mix.  This can get pretty lengthy so I’ll simplify each mushroom down to just a single benefit, though there are generally multiple and often some overlap.

If you really want to understand the benefits of Mushrooms, I recommend giving Mycologist (Mushroom Biologist…I had to look it up) and author of Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World, Paul Stamets, a follow.

Most Ryze products include their proprietary blend of mushrooms that is unique to Ryze.  The first two mushrooms can be considered their Caffeine replacement mushrooms since they provide a boost to focus and energy, Lion’s Mane and Cordyceps.  The full list includes:

• Lions Mane – Known for its beneficial effects on brain health and cognitive function.  
• Cordyceps – Helps to boost energy and muscle recovery as well as treat chronic fatigue. 
• Reishi – Included for its ability to lower stress. It can promote good sleep and is good for liver and heart health.  It has the added benefit of being anti-viral and anti-microbial.
• Shittaki –  Best mushroom for immune support. Anti-inflammatory. Improve bone density.  And reduce cholesterol.  Help ward off cold and flu.  Anti-viral, anti-tumor.
• Turkey Tail – Ryze includes Turkey Tail for gut health and digestion as a pre-biotic helping to regulate gut microbiome. However, it has some pretty amazing anti-cancer properties discussed later that help our immune systems thwart tumor development.
• King Trumpet – Anti-inflammatory. Rich in antioxidants helping to protect the heart and reduce cholesterol.

Best Features of Ryze Mushroom Coffee

Easily the best feature of Ryze is the wide array of mushrooms used, as well as the scarcity of some of their selections. Not that the mushrooms themselves are scarce, but you generally won’t find them in a lot of mushroom supplements, superfoods or greens powders.

The real winner here in my mind is the inclusion of Turkey Tail.  While Ryze includes this for its benefits for supporting gut health and microbiome support, It appears to have some pretty dramatic anti-cancer properties.  So much so that the Japanese have been using it to treat cancer patients as part of their standard practice for decades. 

Now, it’s beyond me at this point why more mushroom products don’t include Turkey Tail specifically in their products with this in mind but it seems that most mushroom-based product and supplement companies don’t know this.

So let’s break these down.

Best mushroom complex.

You’re going to be hard-pressed to find a better mushroom complex in any other product. 

Across other products I’ve looked into from other mushroom coffee brands to superfood blends and greens powders to mushroom supplements, it’s hard to find this good of a mix that you can so easily integrate into your daily routine.

Just drop a serving in your coffee, or replace your current morning beverage routine with one of their products and enjoy the benefits.

Best single mushroom

Turkey Tail.  I could sing the praises of this mushroom all day.  Did I mention it can help fight cancer?  The interesting thing about this mushroom is that it seems to act as an immune modulator.  It doesn’t fight the cancer for you but rather helps your immune system recognize and destroy the cancer.

Flavor variety

Ryze offers a nice variety of beverage products that fit most people’s morning routines.  You can go with their basic Ryze coffee and mix it with whatever creamer you like.

Or, you can get their probiotic creamer and mix it with any coffee or beverage you like.  At this point, you can make your own flavors.  

Taste

The earthy flavors of the mushroom blend give it a somewhat chai flavor.  I suppose this is why chai can be a popular favor blend for some of these companies.  Kinda like a dirty chai with the coffee flavor, putting it somewhere between coffee and tea in the flavor profile.  Either way, it generally pairs very well with your milk or creamer of choice which Ryze is happy to point out for you as well.

Price

Cost.  Depending on the products you choose, minus discounts, you’re looking at around $30-45 dollars for a 30 days supply which is in line with what seems to be the industry standard for mixes.

Ryze Mushroom Coffee Pricing

The pricing of Ryze is great and compares with most pod coffee makers.  Each pouch comes with approximately 30 services which put it at about $1.00-1.30 for a cup of coffee, or about the price of an individual Nespresso pod, my personal previous daily coffee habit.

Much cheaper than a daily Starbucks coffee.  

Ryze Mushroom Coffee: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

No product is perfect and what might be important to one person might not be important to another so I’ll break down the Good (pros), the Bad (cons), and the Ugly (competitors and alternatives).

The Good

Look, The earthy flavors of the mushrooms are actually really tasty.  As mentioned above the best flavor comparison I could make here is to chai.  So think a little heavier than your average tea, but lighter than your average coffee.  

They also come with different options to meet your needs.  Their core product offers an all-in-one or you can go with their probiotic mushroom creamer which contains the same six-mushroom complex that you can add to your coffee of choice, no instant!

They also offer a mushroom matcha that is my personal favorite, and even chicory for those looking to go completely caffeine-free.

Cost is a big plus in my mind.  With about 30 servings per pack, you’re looking at a cost of about 90 cents, for your daily coffee habit.  Slightly more if you go with the matcha.

The Bad

Ryze does not claim to use 100% fruiting body.  That said, the beneficial compounds of mushrooms can be found in either the fruiting body or mycelium (the part that grows underground).

Based on my reading of the research and understanding of why mushrooms are beneficial I’m not sold on the idea of needing 100% fruiting body in my mushroom supplement and see greater value in supplements that contain both.  Though I’ve listed it as a con here as many prefer 100% fruiting body from their supplements.

One of the world’s leading mycologists, Paul Stamets himself on the benefits of Mycelium in your supplements.

It’s also worth mentioning that the FDA requires mushroom mycelium products to be labeled as such.  Since Ryze isn’t labeled as mycelium, you can safely assume it is made with both mycelium and fruiting body, so, the whole mushroom.

I would be remiss to recommend a food product to anyone without being conscious of food allergies or sensitivities.  Because there are a number of different mushrooms that your gut probably hasn’t seen before there is the potential that one of the ingredients just won’t agree with you.  On top of that, you won’t really know which one is causing the problem.  

At that point, you’d be forced to start taking one mushroom supplement at a time to figure out which one was causing the problem and in the end, still doesn’t help you with this product.  

So if it causes you digestive distress, you probably want to check out a single mushroom competitor.

So this product might not be best if you know you have certain food sensitivities.  But, you never know until you give it a shot.

Their website isn’t that great.  For some strange unexplainable reason, they made it difficult to find the shop all section where you can look at any of their offerings outside of their core product, I promise they’re there.  

Hint, if you click on the menu icon and then scroll down to the muted grey text you can select “shop on demand” to see all of their product offerings.

The Ugly…Competitors

The mushroom coffee space seems to be growing (pun intended) new competitors every day.

Their website isn’t that great.  For some strange unexplainable reason, they made it difficult to find the shop all section where you can look at any of their offerings outside of their core product. I promise they’re there.  

Hint, if you click on the menu icon and then scroll down to the muted grey text you can select “shop on demand” to see all of their product offerings.

Below is a quick list of competitors and what they offer.

Four Sigmatic

Four Sigmatic specializes in mushroom coffee and most of their offerings provide a single source mushroom for a single benefit.  So if you’re looking for more than one benefit you would need to buy 4-6 different coffees to get the same benefit as one bag of Ryze. However, this is probably the next best product.  Plus they offer their mushrooms mixed with ground coffee you can brew in a regular drip coffee maker.

Everyday Dose

Everyday Dose is a similar company to Ryze in that they offer few products and focus on the morning beverage market.  They offer a very limited selection of coffee or matcha with only two mushrooms in their mix: Lion’s Mane and Chaga

MUDWTR

MUDWTR.  Which you may have heard of is more of a coffee replacement.  It’s focused on being a mushroom based coffee alternative so low to no caffein.  It’s not coffee and doesn’t contain coffee.  Their core product flavor profile is based on chai, cacao, and cinnamon.  Definitely a solid combination.  

• Lion’s Mane
• Chaga
• Reishi 
• Cordyceps

Honorable mentions

Huel, AG1, and Ka’chava.  Each of these greens powders or “superfood blends” boasts various “adaptogen and super mushroom” complex ingredients. If you look into them none of these come close to offering even close to Even these don’t come close to beating the wide array offered by Ryze.

For a quick cheat sheet, you’ll get the following mushroom blends

• Huel Greens – Maitake, Shiitake, Reishi, Cordyceps
• Huel Superblend – Reishi, Cordyceps, Lion’s Mane
• AG1 – Reishi, Shiitake
• Ka’chava – Maitake, Shiitake, Reishi, Cordyceps

Freshcap.  If you wanna skip the beverage and just go with a supplement that you can mix into anything Freshcap is a great option.  It’s a great source of high-quality mushroom supplements.  They don’t make coffee but their Ultimate Mushroom Complex is another great way to get mushrooms into your diet in pill or powder form.  It’s a great complex that includes Turkey Tail!

Ryze Mushroom Coffee personal experience

I’ve been drinking Ryze now for a little over a year and I love it.  I’ve also recently switched over to the Ryze matcha which is another great option if you’re looking for something to replace your coffee.

If you like the idea that food is medicine but you don’t want to have to remember to take pills every day, dropping a serving of Ryze in your morning beverage that’s already part of your daily routine is easy.

Since I’ve kicked over to Ryze Matcha, I’ve found that I have more energy throughout the day, better focus, and most of all, despite the cesspool of germs and illness that my toddlers are exposing me to regularly, I’m even getting sick less often.

But if you wanna know what the pros are saying, the best message I’ve heard on why you should be getting these functional mushrooms in your diet comes from Paul Stamets in a TED talk from 2011.

Have I mentioned yet that the Japanese have been using turkey tail specifically as part of a cancer treatment since the 80s?  I really don’t know how many more times I have to say it.  Look even if you don’t like the idea of mushroom coffee or beverages, I recommend you figure out a way to get turkey tail into your diet.  

Conclusion: Should You Buy Ryze Mushroom Coffee?

Listen, I’m obviously biased here, I’m a customer and I love the stuff so I definitely recommend you give it a try.  That said if you’re a coffee fan, skip the coffee blend and go straight for the creamer and add that to your coffee of choice.  

If you’re looking for a coffee alternative try the matcha or chicory options.

There’s probably not a better regular mushroom supplement that’s going to give you this diverse and impressive mix of mushrooms all in one shot you never have to think about because it’s attached to your morning routine.

So whether you’re leaning towards their coffee, matcha, chicory, or just the creamer, give it a try, you won’t regret it.