Magic mushroom chocolates are a popular way of consuming psychedelic mushrooms. These chocolates are made by infusing dried magic mushrooms into melted chocolate. The main idea behind magic mushroom chocolates is to provide an easier, tastier, and more convenient way to consume psychedelic mushrooms. By infusing the mushrooms into the chocolate, the strong earthy taste of the mushrooms is often masked, making it a more palatable option for those who find the taste of mushrooms unpleasant. The chocolate also helps to mask the texture of the mushrooms, which can be quite chewy and unappealing to some people. Another advantage of magic mushroom chocolates is their portability.
Shrooms chocolates come in a wide variety of shapes, sizes, strengths, and flavors. Mushroom chocolates can be ingested for some semi-psychoactive effects or for wellness and microdosing. By microdosing, you gain the incredible benefits of mushrooms without feeling the "trippy" effects they can create.
There are so many health benefits we are discovering every day, how mushrooms can improve your mental state of well-being and create new neural pathways in the brain. The cool thing about Lion s Mane is it can break through that barrier because its compounds are so molecularly light, they can get past the blood-brain barrier and nourish your brain.
Another advantage of magic mushroom chocolates is their portability. They can easily be carried in a bag or pocket, allowing for discreet and convenient consumption. This is a significant benefit for those who wish to consume psychedelic mushrooms in public or social settings.
Mushroom Chocolate Brand Alice Invites Consumers Through The Looking Glass
Amid a mushroom renaissance in the U.S., new products are coming online that reflect the consumer’s desire to utilize fungi in all of its forms. Mushrooms are not limited to the psychoactive kind, psilocybin, but include a vast web of functional mushrooms.
Enter Alice, an adaptogenic mushroom chocolate and lifestyle brand founded in California. Alice oozes comfort and accessibility while also toting some extremely potent nootropics, which include an array of compounds alongside mushrooms that work as “cognitive enhancers.” Alice co-founders Lindsay Goodstein, CEO, and Charlotte Cruze, CMO, have walked through the direct-to-consumer product rabbit hole into America’s great mushroom revolution. They announced the launch of the brand in Venice, California, on October 20, 2022. Its debut includes two mushroom chocolate bars called Brainstorm and Nightcap that are kosher, gluten-free, vegan, dairy-free, and made with ethically-sourced fruiting body mushrooms and chocolate.
The brand is focused on education around the three major types of mushrooms people interact with most in their daily lives: edible, adaptogenic, and psychedelic. While these mushroom chocolate bars do not contain the psychoactive mushroom psilocybin (yet), Alice’s founders don’t discriminate. Working with attorneys who specialize in emerging medicines, you can follow this metaphoric white rabbit into the psilocybin-laced future. The Alice team says they aim to be the very first psilocybin mushroom bar on the market once regulations and a legal framework exist.
I caught up with the founders Goodstein and Cruze to ask more about the process of developing an adaptogenic mushroom chocolate line, what the data says about mushrooms, nootropics, and their known benefits, and how people can begin to dismantle what they call an internalized “mycophobia,” following decades of false propaganda à la mushroom madness.
MORE FROM FORBES ADVISORBest Travel Insurance Companies
Amy Danise EditorBest Covid-19 Travel Insurance Plans
Amy Danise EditorTell me about your journey of alchemizing mushroom chocolates: when did it begin?
Lindsey Goodstein: The story of Alice started with my desire to create this delicious, functional mushroom chocolate that would offer an instant good feeling, but that also wouldn’t feel like a chore to take. My background is in big pharma. For 7 years, I was talking about medications that I wasn’t passionate about. I started looking into alternatives to pharmaceuticals and I found out about the magic of adaptogenic mushrooms.
The more I learned and the more I explored, I started to find there were no products out there that worked mushrooms into my routine in a delicious way. They were reminiscent of this industry that I wanted to step away from at the time: powders, pills, and tinctures. I didn’t feel like I wanted to ‘endure’ the experience of taking mushrooms. I wanted something delicious that was fun to take. None of the products out there scratched the itch of my instant gratification, as well. It’s what feels the best, right? It’s what gets us hooked.
The two things I struggle with most are sleep and focus. That’s where it began in my kitchen, forming Nightcap for sleep, and Brainstorm for focus. It was interesting timing, that’s when the pandemic hit. I had all the time in the world to play mad scientist and alchemist in my home. I learned how to make the perfect mushroom chocolate, ordering nootropics and adaptogens of every kind. Covering my kitchen with chocolate.
Alice mushroom chocolates and lifestyle brand's Founder & CEO Lindsay Goodstein (left) and . [+] Co-Founder & CMO Charlotte Cruze (right).
With functional mushrooms alone, you don’t feel the effect instantly. They have to be taken daily and then compound in your body over time. I learned that and realized, this has to be the mixture of adaptogens and nootropics, and then the long-term benefits of the functional mushrooms will come in addition to the short-term. And most importantly, I wanted it to be delicious.
Eventually, I was like, I can’t do this on my own. I brought in my own homeopathic doctor. This smooth, dark chocolate taste was really difficult to get. I hung up the apron, brought in a team of biochemists and fifth-generation chocolatiers, and also brought in Charlotte Cruze, who was getting her Master’s in Food Studies at NYU at the time.
We honed it in and landed on a recipe that far exceeded our expectations. It’s this delicious dark chocolate, but you have no idea that it’s packed with these instant beneficial compounds, and then you get the long-term benefits of these fruiting body mushrooms.
Charlotte Cruze: My passion and expertise are in food studies: looking at food systems and a lot of business-centered courses in the food space. I am focused on small businesses and how to effectively run them. It’s been one of the most important journeys for me. I was doing branded content at a publisher. I had this large marketing muscle, but I wasn’t excited to flex it for the products I was working on. I was on this intense search for meaning, which also culminated in my gaining a yoga teaching certificate.
Food is so basic to our daily lives, people don’t think about how much it matters. I wanted to know, how could I make it better? The pandemic led me to NYU, I left my media job and started studying how food systems impact people globally, it’s a cool program. It’s really interdisciplinary, too. There are chefs alongside food scientists, writers, and small business owners. That’s how my journey worked, that program solidified that, I wanted to work on something that had a positive impact on our food system.
Lindsay and I talk all the time about making sure we’re doing it the right way. We believe that it’s the corporation’s responsibility to make improvements in the food system. It’s not all on the individual. We’re making good decisions that we then pass on to the consumer.
Tell our readers about Alice. What is the concept behind its branding, its mission, and who is it for?
Goodstein: So in terms of the name Alice, there are no tiebacks to the book or movie, but it was Alice’s curious personality and her love of nonsense that inspired the real ethos of the brand. There is this one quote I remember to this day. Alice says, “If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be, it would.”
So Alice glorifies a world in which not everything makes perfect sense. We wanted people to come to mushrooms with that same mentality, to be open to the benefit and the beauty in the unknown. People may get closed off or scared when they think of mushrooms because they immediately think psychedelics. But that’s where Alice steps in, to help educate people on the functional benefit of mushrooms.
The new brand's Brainstorm chocolates are focused on energizing ingredients.
For the design of the brand, we wanted a fresh perspective. Something approachable and modern. We wanted it to feel like it was for everyone, not a specific group of people. That’s where it started with me, with my curiosity. We do a little ‘wink wink, nod nod’ about curiosity in the brand and at activations. Curious behavior is something that we endorse very highly here at Alice.
Our mission is to spread the power of mushrooms in the most delightful way possible. We want to normalize the word mushrooms. We really want people when they hear the word mushroom, to associate it with safety, joy, and deliciousness. We want them to feel comfortable, and we wanted to create this delicious chocolate that was helping their health at the same time.
I think that’s another little key to her personality. Alice had a real sense of adventure, and thrill-seeking, but maintained a sense of class. Blacks, creams, chic, minimalist.
Why do we need mushroom and fungi medicines to support our health?
Cruze: Something we think about a lot is, the fungal kingdom is vast. There are so many ways different families in that kingdom can support our health. At Alice, we’re proponents of all mushrooms. There are three main buckets: culinary, functional, and psychedelic. Culinary is edible mushrooms, of course, one of our favorite foods with a huge variety. The benefits you’re going to get from that are similar to the profile of a vegetable.
On the other end of the spectrum, you have psychedelics, which give you that very instant feeling that is described by some as euphoric. There are so many health benefits we are discovering every day, how mushrooms can improve your mental state of well-being and create new neural pathways in the brain.
Somewhere in the middle, we have functional mushrooms. They have a heavy culinary profile, but they can nourish your brain. They can offer mental and physical changes, long-term, to your health. Functional mushrooms are different from psychedelics because, when you take a functional mushroom, you’re not going to feel it instantly. You have to take it and let the mushroom compound over time to get those benefits. We created this indulgent daily routine that’s good for you, that only gets better over time.
Founder & CEO Lindsay Goodstein at the brand's launch party in Venice, California.
So we formulated Brainstorm and Nightcap using three of our favorite mushrooms, to start. In Brainstorm, our mushroom superstars are Cordyceps and Lion’s Mane. Cordyceps is known as the ‘mushroom of the body’ because it improves blood flow, allows oxygen, enhances endurance, helps you learn better, improves memory, and helps central nervous functions. It is the definition of working smarter, not harder. It makes every system function at such a higher capacity.
Then we have Lion’s Mane, the mushroom of the mind. It stimulates nerve growth in the brain, it improves neuroplasticity. Data shows it’s literally brain food. It can break the blood-brain barrier, which is the extremely tight security of the brain that doesn’t want anything from your blood getting in. The cool thing about Lion’s Mane is it can break through that barrier because its compounds are so molecularly light, they can get past the blood-brain barrier and nourish your brain.
We also added in Guarana and phosphatidylserine. Guarana is a caffeinated berry from Brazil. You can compare it lightly to a green tea type of energy. I personally can’t have caffeine from coffee, I get anxious. But Brainstorm makes me feel good, it’s not that intense caffeine type of up-and-down feeling. And phosphatidylserine is a fatty acid source from soybeans, which is great for cognition.
In Nightcap, our hero mushroom we use is reishi, also known as the ‘mushroom of immortality.’ There’s not much reishi can’t do. It can help with immunity and allergies, it has been shown to improve brain function. The reason we chose it for our Nightcap product is its ability to regulate sleep cycles and reduce fatigue, which helps with relaxation. That’s why we love reishi in there. L-theanine, chamomile, zinc, and magnesium are also in Nightcap. They work together holistically to help boost short-term benefits with long-term benefits. Alice works holistically, now and later.
Mushroom-centric merch from new lifestyle and adaptogenic mushroom brand Alice.
Something we’re really passionate about is the quality of the mushrooms. We use only fruiting body mushrooms. I like to use the analogy of the apple and the apple tree: the mushroom fruiting body is the apple and the stems or mycelium is the bark of the tree. We want the apple, we don’t want the tree root, because that’s where the highest nutrition density is. A lot of companies use mycelium because it’s cheaper. It can give the company more mushroom extract for less money. Some people say there are benefits, but we want to stick with what we know which is that the highest density of the mushroom’s benefits is found in the fruiting body.
We’re also quite particular about the mushroom extraction process. When you’re extracting mushrooms at a high rate, it allows more bioavailability from those mushroom compounds, more than you may feel when eating them. A lot of companies use starch or dextrin to help with the drying process, to fill out the product in a way. It ends up creating this less pure, cut product. You’re not getting enough mushroom benefits in many cases. So we don’t use dextrin, and we don’t use starch. You’re getting the purest, most potent product possible. We wanted to pack the largest punch we could in that little bite.
California is moving towards psychedelic drug decriminalization on a state level, and many other counties and states are following suit. Do you want to add psilocybin mushrooms or other medicines in the future to the Alice lineup once legal?
Goodstein: Yes, absolutely. We’re passionate about the benefits of all mushrooms. Once it’s legal to safely incorporate psilocybin into the products, we want to be the first to bring mushroom chocolate to the market. We have an emerging medicine lawyer on our board to make moves in anticipation of the upcoming legislation changes.
What we’re doing at the moment is supporting two nonprofits: the first is the Hope Project. It’s run by Allison Williams, her husband was a Navy Seal. As you’ve seen, there is support for veterans who come back with PTSD and severe trauma. What Allison noticed was so many of these wives and women who served weren’t getting access to this treatment. she helps get access to psilocybin therapy with gold start wives. It’s a female-founded company. It’s cool for us to support a woman who’s helping women get safe access to medicine.
The Microdose Collective is a 510c nonprofit. An interesting part of the conversation around legalization is, it’s going to cascade, right? We’re seeing decriminalization measures first, then we’re going to see in-patient therapies for consumers. That’s not accessible for many people in terms of the time and financial commitment needed. It’s amazing, and I hope they do expand and help people, but there are so many healing benefits from smaller microdoses of psilocybin. Making it as accessible as possible is the ultimate goal. That’s why we’re so happy to be a part of the founding of this organization.
One more thing I want to note is, we are so passionate about education. We are adamant about incorporating that into our product, to pay respect to indigenous people who have used this medicine for hundreds and thousands of years. We want o enter the space as consciously as possible. We are focused on educating people on the long lineage of plant use, we didn’t come up with this practice. We want to honor its legacy and its roots in our work.
Nightcap is the brand's mushroom chocolate and compound blend meant for relaxation.
In your opinion: Are we living in a mushroom renaissance?
Cruze: Yes, 100%. We think we’re just at the beginning. Mushrooms are popping up everywhere, literally and figuratively. People are getting more interested. There’s education to be done. I have friends who have watched me and they’re still like, ‘is your Nightcap chocolate going to make me trip?’ Mushrooms truly are everywhere, I’ve been sent 10 different mushroom ads today on social media. But culturally, there’s still this internalized mycophobia that we are trying to combat.
We are confident this isn’t a fad. We want to take this energy and this buzz and help make it a wellness mainstay. We are doing this with education. We want to be at the forefront, guiding people through this mushroom renaissance. To improve their well-being in a meaningful way.
Part of combatting that mycophobia we’ve been talking about is having people wear their mushroom love on their sleeves. In our merch, one shirt simply says “mushrooms” on the front. The more people see it, the more people are going to normalize it, and be comfortable with it. It will push forward the entire mushroom-loving community. To echo what Lindsay said, our mission is to spread the power of mushrooms in the most delightful way possible. We want to bring education into the mushroom space.
I think that’s another little key to her personality. Alice had a real sense of adventure, and thrill-seeking, but maintained a sense of class. Blacks, creams, chic, minimalist.
The potency of magic mushroom chocolates can vary depending on the dose of mushrooms used and the chocolate-to-mushroom ratio. It is crucial to consume them responsibly and be aware of the dose to avoid any potential negative effects. While magic mushroom chocolates can provide a more enjoyable and convenient method of consuming psychedelic mushrooms, it is essential to remember that these substances can have powerful effects on the mind and should be approached with caution and respect..
Reviews for "Magic Mushroom Chocolates and Self-Discovery: Embracing Personal Growth through Psychedelics"
1. Sarah - 2 stars - I tried these magic mushroom chocolates and I have to say, I was extremely disappointed. The texture was unpleasantly mushy and the taste was just awful. It left a bitter aftertaste in my mouth that lasted for hours. Moreover, the effects were underwhelming. I didn't feel any significant change in my mood or perception, despite consuming the entire bar. Overall, I regret buying these chocolates and I don't think I'll be giving them another try.
2. John - 1 star - I had high hopes for these magic mushroom chocolates, but they turned out to be a complete letdown. The packaging promised a mind-bending experience, but all I got was severe stomach discomfort. The chocolate itself was mediocre at best, lacking the richness and smoothness I expected. As for the psychedelic effects, there were none to be found. I felt no change in my state of mind or consciousness. It's safe to say that these chocolates did not live up to the hype.
3. Emily - 2 stars - After trying these magic mushroom chocolates, I was left feeling dissatisfied and unimpressed. The chocolate coating was waxy and tasted artificial, while the inner mushroom-infused layer had a peculiar, earthy flavor that was hard to stomach. Unfortunately, the effects were minimal as well. I didn't experience any significant changes in my perception or mood. Considering the high price point of these chocolates, I expected a much more enjoyable and potent experience. I won't be recommending these to anyone seeking a true psychedelic encounter.
4. Mark - 2 stars - I had bought these magic mushroom chocolates with great anticipation, but ultimately, they failed to impress. The chocolate itself was average, nothing particularly outstanding. The psychedelic effects were weak and short-lived. I was hoping for a mind-expanding journey, but all I got was a mild buzz that quickly faded away. Considering the risk and legal implications associated with psychedelic substances, I expected a more impactful experience. These chocolates are simply not worth the hype nor the money.