Back when COVID hit and anxiety was a common theme, for Nick Sutcliffe, it brought on a type of hypochondria.

“I always thought that, I’d get a little bump on the leg, and I thought that was it. That’s the end.”

After talking with a friend, he was advised to take lion’s mane mushroom for his anxiety. “So, I did, and it obliterated my hypochondria in three weeks,” Sutcliffe, co-founder of Mad Bee Collective told FoodNX in an interview.

Today, the company has introduced a unique energy drink from its Hockley Valley, Ont. location, known as Starmount.

It’s a lemon-flavoured, carbonated drink that includes lion’s mane and caffeine from Guarana. “It was just a natural evolution that we said, 'let’s figure out how to put lion’s mane in a drink and get it to as many people as possible,' and so that was the genesis of Starmount,” Sutcliffe said.

Benefits of functional mushrooms 

Lion’s mane is known for its ability to support focus and mental clarity, he said. It’s part of a family of mushrooms known as functional, which also includes others such as Cordyceps and Reishi varieties.

While knowledge about its medicinal properties isn’t new — it has been used in Asia for thousands of years — people in the west generally mixed it with coffee to get its benefits, Sutcliffe said.

But he and his co-founder and wife Lindsay, decided to proceed differently.

“What we wanted to do was combine it with a format that everyone knew, that wasn’t coffee, that was refreshing; approachable, delicious,” Sutcliffe said.

And this isn’t the first time the company had a hand in creating a beverage that was unique in its category.

“We started Pommies Cider back in 2010 and I don’t know whether you remember back in 2010, but no one really knew what cider was.”

Similarly to the energy-mushroom drink category, offering a cider product back then in Ontario was challenging, he said.

“What we realized was that we didn’t have to just build Pommies as a brand, we had to build the whole category because no one really knew about cider. When we were doing tastings, I would say over 50 per cent of the people had no clue what cider was, so it was kind of a dual-education thing.”

Learning from past experience

When developing Starmount, the couple remembered lessons from their past developing alcoholic cider drinks.

“Let’s keep all the knowledge that we had from Pommies; keep our philosophy, keep it natural, keep it simple, and then really take the benefits that we were personally feeling from the functional mushrooms, put them in a can that tasted really delicious,” Sutcliffe said.

It also includes organic, natural cane sugar, which is a departure from some of the more well-known energy drink manufacturers.

“We are not believers in the artificial and hyper-processed sweeteners that you get in a lot of other energy drinks. We actually think those are not necessarily good for you, whereas a moderate amount of organic cane sugar, we believe, complements the drink and brings out the flavour, because at the end of the day the most important thing is something that tastes good, so people want to drink day in and day out,” he said.

Starmount is entering a market with a lot of well-financed players who already have captured a large part of the market, hoping to offer a more balanced and milder approach to energy, he said.

“We want a drink that’s going to help people, not necessarily find wings and fly, but just get through the afternoon: we have a beverage here that will help people get through their Excel spreadsheets, it’ll help get through the next shift, it’ll help you get through the sales presentations.”  

“Some of the benefits that they’ve really shown are cognitive, so they help you think clearer, they help you focus, they give you clarity, they help with memory,” Sutcliffe said.

The drink also offers less caffeine, he said. “We have 110 milligrams per can, whereas there are other energy drinks with 200 plus milligrams, so we wanted to keep it moderate.”

Moving to retail distribution

The company currently ships its product direct to consumers in four- and 12-packs, and hopes to offer it in retail stores soon.

They are not stopping at just one mushroom drink, as they are working on a hydration beverage product, Lindsay Sutcliffe said.

“It’s using the cordyceps mushroom, which is really known for not only energy but for body recovery, and pairing that in a hydration, non-carbonated beverage (for) people at the gym or just people looking to hydrate after a workout.”

As well, she said the company is in development with a “calming beverage, which is with a Reishi mushroom, which would be kind of an end-of-day, relaxed and chill version,” she said.

But they remain in the early stages of their mushroom-drink journey, according to Mark.

“We’re real believers in functional mushrooms, and we’re real believers that people are looking for a more natural alternative: a balanced, healthy lifestyle, and we’re really excited about riding that wave and leading the charge of helping people find something delicious and good for them.”