Extraction
Anyone can grind a mushroom.
We open it.
A mushroom keeps its best compounds locked behind a wall the human gut cannot break. The mitovito process exists for one reason: to open that wall under controlled heat, separate what matters, and deliver it as a clean, measurable powder. Eight stages. No grain. No shortcuts.
Why extraction exists?
The wall between you and the mushroom
Every cell in a mushroom is wrapped in chitin, the same rigid polymer that forms the shell of a lobster. Human digestion has no enzyme for it. Grind a dried mushroom into powder and the chitin stays intact: the compounds inside are present on paper, and largely unavailable in practice.
From Forest to Pouch
How We Make It?
Every mitovito pouch contains one mushroom, one extract, and nothing else. This page explains every step of how we get from a living mushroom fruiting body to the pure extract powder that ends up in your cup, and why every decision in that process matters for what you actually absorb.
The mitovito process: 8 Controlled stages
The EXTRACTION
Eight stages, start to finish
Every mitovito batch travels the same road. The species changes. The schedule changes. The discipline does not.
Cultivation and harvesting
It begins with the mushroom itself, the fruiting body, the part that breaks the surface and forms a cap. Not the root like web of mycelium, and never mycelium grown on a bed of sterilised grain and then sold as mushroom. Each species is cultivated on its own, on its own schedule, under its own conditions.
Harvest timing decides everything downstream. Picked too early and the cell wall has not finished building its polysaccharide reserves. Picked too late and the fruiting body begins releasing spores and spending what it stored. Our growers harvest at peak maturity, by hand, and move the crop to washing the same day.
FarM
Weeks to months
1
Washing and sorting
Fresh mushrooms arrive carrying field dust, fragments of growing substrate and the occasional damaged cap. They are washed in clean water, then sorted by hand on inspection tables.
Sorting is where purity is either earned or lost. Stems, substrate residue, discoloured caps and anything below grade are removed and never rejoined to the batch. This stage protects the one claim the whole brand rests on: what enters the extractor is fruiting body, and nothing else.
Same day Manual grading
2
Drying and industrial milling
A fresh mushroom is mostly water, and water is the enemy of a stable batch. The sorted crop is dried in controlled warm air until moisture falls to a level where microbial growth stops and the material can be stored, weighed and dosed with accuracy.
The dried mushrooms are then milled to a fine, uniform particle size. This is not cosmetic. Extraction is a surface area problem: the finer and more consistent the grind, the more cell wall is exposed to hot water, and the more completely the soluble fraction is drawn out at stage four. A coarse, uneven grind leaves value locked inside the biggest particles.
Goal Low moisture, stable biomass
Controlled air Fine mill
3
Hot water extraction
This is the stage that separates an extract from a powder, and it is the reason this page exists.
The milled fruiting body is loaded into stainless steel extraction vessels and held in hot water for several hours. Temperature and time are held steady, because both matter in opposite directions. Too cool or too brief and the chitin never yields, so yield collapses and the batch is a powder in disguise. Too hot or too long and the long chain polysaccharides begin to fragment, which costs structure, colour and aroma.
Held correctly, the vessel ends up holding a dark, aromatic liquor carrying the water soluble fraction of the mushroom, and a bed of exhausted fibre that has given up what it had. Nothing is added. Nothing is substituted. The only inputs are mushroom, water, heat and time.
The heart Sustained heaT/hours
4
Advanced filtration and separation
The extraction liquor leaving stage four is rich but crowded. It still carries suspended biomass, fine insoluble particles and spent fibre that contribute weight without contributing anything else.
The liquid passes through progressively finer filtration, each pass removing a smaller class of particle than the last. The spent biomass is separated out and leaves the process for good. What continues forward is a clarified solution: the soluble fraction of the mushroom, now free of the material that never dissolved.
This stage is also why a true extract pours and dissolves cleanly instead of settling as grit in the bottom of a cup.
Separation Progressive filtration
5
Vacuum evaporation and concentration
The clarified solution is mostly water, and that water has to go. The obvious way to remove it is to boil it off. The obvious way is also the wrong way.
Instead the solution enters a vacuum evaporator. Lowering the pressure lowers the temperature at which water boils, so the same volume can be driven off far more gently than open boiling would allow. The extract concentrates steadily while the heat load on the polysaccharides stays low.
This is one of the quiet decisions that separates a careful extract from a cheap one. Aggressive heat here would save hours and cost exactly the compounds the entire process was built to protect.
Low pressure Low temperature
6
Spray drying
The concentrate is pumped to an atomiser and sprayed into a drying chamber as a mist of microscopic droplets. Because each droplet is so small, its surface area relative to its volume is enormous, and the remaining water flashes away almost instantly. A droplet enters as liquid and leaves as a dry particle in a matter of seconds.
Speed is the protection. The powder spends almost no time at temperature, which is why spray drying is the industry standard for heat sensitive botanical extracts rather than a tray oven running for hours.
Many brands add maltodextrin, rice starch or silica at this point as a carrier, because carriers make drying easier, improve flow and cost a fraction of what extract costs. We add none of them. What leaves our dryer is pure extract, and the colour it carries is the true colour of that species: pale ivory for lion's mane, deep umber for chaga, rust gold for cordyceps.
Seconds Atomised drying
7
Laboratory quality control and packaging
No batch is released on the strength of the process alone. Each one is tested before it goes near a pouch: identity confirmed as the declared species, polysaccharide content measured against our 30% standard, moisture checked, and screening carried out for microbial contamination and heavy metals.
Only then does the extract reach packaging. Each 20 g pouch is filled, given its own scoop so that one level scoop delivers a 1 g serving without guesswork, sealed with a desiccant to hold moisture at bay, and marked with its batch code so the finished pouch can be traced back to the harvest that made it.
Batch Verification
8
Why Process Matters
The difference between a functional mushroom product and a mushroom-flavoured one is entirely in the process.
The functional compounds in mushrooms, the beta-glucans, polysaccharides, triterpenes, and unique bioactive molecules like hericenones and cordycepin, are not freely available. They are locked inside chitin-walled cells in the fungal fruiting body. Chitin is one of the toughest natural polymers on earth, the same material that forms insect exoskeletons. Human digestive enzymes cannot break it down. Without proper extraction, most of the bioactive content of a functional mushroom passes through the digestive system largely unabsorbed.
Hot-water extraction is the solution that two thousand years of Asian medicinal tradition discovered, and modern food science has validated. By cooking the fruiting body in hot water at a controlled temperature and pressure for a specific duration, the chitin cell walls are broken down and the water-soluble polysaccharides are liberated into solution. The resulting liquid is then concentrated and spray-dried into a standardised extract powder. This is what's in your mitovito pouch: not ground mushroom, not mycelium, not fruiting body powder, a concentrated, standardised hot-water extract of the fruiting body.
🔓
Unlocks what is locked inside
Raw mushrooms vary enormously in bioactive content depending on season, location, substrate, and growing conditions. Extraction with standardisation eliminates this variability. mitovito extracts are standardised to a minimum of ≥30% polysaccharides (≥300mg per 1g serving). You get the same thing every time.
📐
Standardises what you get
Chitin cell walls must be broken down before beta-glucans and polysaccharides become bioavailable. Hot water at the right temperature and duration is the most effective method for liberating water-soluble compounds. Raw ground mushroom powder, even from the fruiting body, has dramatically lower bioavailability than a properly produced hot-water extract.
✂️
Removes what does not belong
💧
Matches your body's mechanism
Extraction concentrates the bioactive fraction and discards inert material: undigested chitin, non-functional cellular components, and the bulk of the mushroom's water weight. The concentrated extract powder is a purer, more potent, and more bioavailable form than any whole mushroom product at an equivalent serving size. This is why 1g of extract delivers meaningful polysaccharide content while 1g of ground mushroom powder delivers very little.
Your digestive system is aqueous, it processes nutrients in water. Hot-water extracted polysaccharides are already in the water-soluble form your gut's immune receptors interact with. This is not a coincidence. It's why traditional cultures brewed mushrooms in hot water for millennia before modern extraction science could explain why it worked.
Heat is the tool and the threat
The same energy that opens a cell wall will also break the molecule you were trying to free. Read the process as a temperature curve and the logic becomes obvious: heat hard where it liberates, pull back everywhere it only destroys.
The discipline
Beta-glucans are the compound class most often measured in functional mushroom research, and the validated AOAC style assay developed for mushroom matrices was published specifically to separate true beta-glucan from the alpha-glucan starch contributed by grain substrate. McCleary and Draga, Journal of AOAC International, 2016.
Independent analysis of North American mushroom supplements has repeatedly found products sold as mushroom extract that are substantially grain derived starch rather than fruiting body polysaccharide. Chilton, presented at the International Society for Mushroom Science, 2016.
The difference
Powder and extract are not the same product
They can sit on a shelf in identical jars, use identical words on the front, and cost wildly different amounts to make. Here is what actually separates them.
What hot water extraction does not do
We would rather tell you this than let you find it elsewhere. Hot water pulls out the water soluble fraction, which is where the beta-glucans and most of the researched polysaccharides live. It does not efficiently capture fat soluble compounds such as the triterpenes found in reishi, which need an alcohol step to extract well. Our process is a hot water extraction, and our labels say so. If a brand claims a single water extraction delivers the full triterpene profile, that claim deserves a question.
From our extractor to your cup
Eight stages. One level scoop.
Every pouch holds 20 g of single species extract and the scoop that measures it. One level scoop is one gram, stirred into coffee, tea or warm water. That is the entire ritual, and everything on this page exists to make that one gram worth taking.
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These statements have not been evaluated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration or the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. mitovito products are sold strictly as conventional food ingredients in both the United States and Canada, not as dietary supplements, drugs, or natural health products, and are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Consult a qualified healthcare professional before use if you are pregnant, nursing, taking medication, or managing a health condition.
