Our Story
The Founders of KÄÄPÄ Mushrooms had a Vision.
In 2018 Eric Puro, Otso Mursula, and Seppo Riikonen were brought together by a vision; disruption. The disruption of an industry supplied by low quality functional mushroom products. They wanted to show the world what quality functional mushrooms are really like. Back then, little did they know that this vision would require them to build a deeply complex and intricate company, but that’s exactly what they did and KÄÄPÄ Mushrooms was born.
Following the vision of disruption came the guiding principles, which remain the same to this day:
Transparent Quality, Sustainability, and a Commitment to Science.
Transparent Quality
It’s one thing to put in place what we at KÄÄPÄ think are the right processes to provide the best quality functional mushrooms in the world, but it’s also vital that we have recognised and globally accredited third party organizations verify everything we do.
WARNING! What’s to follow in this next paragraph is a lot of technical sounding words and acronyms, but the point is that we did everything necessary (and more!) to become independently recognised as having the very best quality possible.
KÄÄPÄ became FSSC 22000 certified - this ensures that food safety standards and processes are strictly kept, and are recognised in the food manufacturing industry and its related supply chain. These processes and the FSSC 22000 certificate are GFSI-recognised, which means that there is global recognition that we are doing everything the right way. No corners cut. High quality functional mushrooms independently certified by the world’s leading authorities.
But that wasn’t enough for us! We want to show you in as many ways possible that we’re providing you with the best quality functional mushrooms. Not only do we have a world-leading Quality Department (that works with highly certified and traceable suppliers, has unique parameters and inspections for each species throughout all stages from spore-to-extract, and keeps everyone on their toes with friendly reminders - thanks Cynthia!), but we took it upon ourselves to be transparent about every step of the spore-to-extract production process.
This is why you will find a QR code on every box which helps you to learn more about what’s inside and how we created that very product. And you know what? That’s an independently verified company doing that for KÄÄPÄ, it’s not us telling you it’s good quality, it’s someone else!
Sustainability
We live in an unpredictable future, but what we do know is that we’re doing everything we can to give more back to planet earth, than to take from it.
We started with a modest outdoor mushroom farm. There we learned a lot about what our mushrooms needed for their growing conditions and then we went about simulating those conditions indoors using sustainable wood and Finnish birch substrate.
Why is this important?
Well, Finland has the cleanest air and some of the cleanest water ever measured, which means the forests and the trees growing here are super clean and that means our mushrooms are eating the healthiest and cleanest food possible – Finnish birch trees. The substrate from them is FSC and/or PEFC certified, committing us to sustainable forest practices. Based on our experience from our original mushroom farm, we now have control over all the growing conditions, such as the temperature, humidity, O₂ and CO₂-levels, light, and added stress factors to produce mushrooms with the best quality and highest levels of the Compounds of Interest (the good stuff!).
That would be good enough for a lot of companies, to be happy knowing that their mushrooms are growing on sustainable sources. However, we pushed ourselves further and looked at what we could do to give back to the planet. This led us to set up the KÄÄPÄ Forest subdivision. A subdivision dedicated to promoting versatile use of forests and the forest cultivation of chaga.
Simply put, KÄÄPÄ Forest is managing the largest chaga cultivation network in the world. Chaga grows very, very, very slowly and is being overharvested in the world, so we tackled this problem by working closely with forest owners to start large scale chaga cultivation . We inoculate their birch trees, then when the chaga is ready we harvest it. This enables a truly transparent growing environment for our chaga mushroom production. Today, KÄÄPÄ Forest grows chaga across Finland in a continuously growing forest area which is currently over 500 hectares in size.
Why is this a good thing?
It is very important for us to change the traditional scenario of our Nordic forests being cut down solely for use in the paper and logging industries – instead we now have a business model that supports keeping the trees where they should be (in their forests!), while cultivating medicinal mushrooms, and extracting hundreds of tons of carbon each year. More information (in Finnish) can be found at the KÄÄPÄ Forest website.
A Commitment to Science
If you’re going to make a claim, you’d better be able to back it up, right? After all that’s what has directed us through our guiding principles and vision. If you want to disrupt you need to disrupt in a big way, if you want to have the best quality product then you need transparency to build trust and show it’s the best, and if you’re truly committed to sustainability you’d better do it properly and not just give lip-service. So, it’s vital to us that when it comes to claims about our products, that we back it up with science.
This led us to pioneering the industry leading extraction technology that we use today. Again, a quick warning that the following paragraph includes lots of weird sounding words, but essentially, we take ground mushroom fruiting bodies (the best bit!) and place it into ultrasonic assisted extraction (UAE) equipment. We use purified spring water with UAE technology to produce high yields of bioavailable compounds (translation: pure water + cutting edge tech = more of the best bits from the mushrooms).
Each fungi has a unique and different method of extraction because what we’re after is different in each one. What our highly technical and science lead extraction process ensures, is that the Compounds of Interest (the good stuff) are bioavailable for your use (available for your body to absorb).
There have been various studies into the benefits of Lion’s Mane and you can read what others think in their articles such as these.
We have an incredible science team, led by our Scientific Director, Heikki Kiheri. Their efforts are helping to pioneer the functional mushroom industry. They are constantly pushing the boundaries of what’s possible and exploring ideas to bring you the very best quality mushroom products. A huge thank you to that team for everything they do!
