Custom Formulation Options for Lion’s Mane Products

Custom formulation means you decide the format, the serve and what goes in alongside the Lion’s Mane. White label means you take a finished product and put your name on it. Both are fine. They just suit brands at different stages.

We grow and extract our Lion’s Mane on our farm in Thomastown, Victoria, and we supply it both ways. Here’s what going custom actually involves.

Why Bother Going Custom?

Because nobody else can sell your product.

A custom formula lets you pair Lion’s Mane with other ingredients, set your own serve and pick a format that matches how your customers actually take it. You also control the ingredient list, which counts if a clean label is part of your pitch.

The trade-off is more decisions: serve size, what else goes in, how it holds up on the shelf, whether it runs efficiently on a line. Plenty of brands start with one product, see what sells, then build a range off the same base.

Not sure which route suits you? A rough rule. If you want to be on the shelf quickly and your story is the ingredient itself, white label gets you there with fewer moving parts. If your story is the blend, the ritual or the format, you’ll end up going custom sooner or later, so you may as well plan for it now.

Start With the Extract

Almost every Lion’s Mane product is built on an extract, not plain dried mushroom powder. More mushroom in less space means smaller serves, and that matters most in capsules. Extracts are also easier to keep consistent from run to run.

Our Lion’s Mane extract powder is a 10:1 extract from 100% fruiting body, with no added starch, grain, mycelium or fillers. The ratio describes how much raw material went in.

Our spec sheet puts it at about 4 kg of fresh Lion’s Mane per 100 g of extract.

Worth saying plainly: a ratio isn’t a measurement of what’s in the powder. Lab testing does that job.

Picking a Format

Format drives nearly everything else, so start with one question. How will your customer take it?

Capsules

The quickest route to a first launch. The serve is fixed, so dosing is simple and consistent, and packaging is straightforward. Ours hold 300 mg each, taken as a 2 x 300 mg serve.

Capsule space is tight, which is why a concentrated extract helps. Adding other mushroom extracts or botanicals to the same capsule? Then powder density, particle size and compatibility decide how well it fills. Your encapsulator will advise on capsule size for your fill weight.

Powder Blends

For the daily ritual crowd: a scoop in coffee, a smoothie or a wellness drink. Our straight powder is a 1 g serve.

Powders hold more total ingredient than a capsule, so you can build in plant proteins, minerals or botanicals. The headaches are practical ones, mixing, taste and flow. Every scoop needs the same amount of everything, and ingredients with very different particle size or density will separate in the pouch on the back of a truck.

They suit brands going after functional drinks and mushroom based food products.

Functional Beverage Mixes

Drink mixes are usually pitched as daily wellness drinks, coffee alternatives or nootropic style beverages. Taste and dispersal matter more here than anywhere else. The extract has to spread through hot or cold liquid without clumping or sinking, and the flavour has to sit well next to cacao, adaptogenic herbs, coffee alternatives or natural flavours.

Shelf life matters here too: every ingredient in the mix has to stay stable for as long as the date you print on the pack. Budget for more test batches than you would for capsules. And taste it the way your customer will, in a mug, not off a spatula.

Multi Ingredient Formulas

Lots of custom products are multi ingredient blends with Lion’s Mane as one active among several. A multi mushroom blend with reishi or cordyceps is the obvious example.

More ingredients, more to check. Moisture sensitivity, density, flavour and chemical stability have to be tested together, not one at a time, and nothing you add should knock the Lion’s Mane extract’s quality around. Get it right and you’ve got a product that’s hard to copy.

Liquid Extract and Tincture Formats

Less common. Some brands build tinctures or liquid concentrates, taken straight or added to a drink.

Liquids raise stability, preservation and packaging questions, and the extract has to stay evenly suspended at the same strength over time. If you’ve got a liquid concept, talk to us early. We’ll tell you honestly whether our powder suits your base.

The Order We’d Work In

1. Choose the extract supplier: fruiting body, a stated ratio, a written extraction method and dated lab reports. Get the spec sheet and samples.
2. Fix the format. It sets serve size, concentration and packaging.
3. Plan the serve. A 10:1 Lion’s Mane extract keeps the amount practical.
4. Add the other ingredients and check they get on with the extract and each other.
5. Prototype: blending, flow, how evenly everything spreads.
6. Run it on real equipment. Small ratio tweaks here are normal.
7. Test the finished product before launch.

A formula that tastes great but won’t run on the filling line isn’t finished.

A Note on Serve Size and Ratio

Your serve is one of the first numbers you’ll lock in. Decide how much Lion’s Mane each serve needs for your concept, then remember everything else in the blend shares that space. Capsule fill weight has a hard ceiling. A concentrated extract with a stable ratio from one order to the next is what keeps your label accurate. Ours, again, is about 4 kg of fresh mushroom per 100 g of extract.

A worked thought: if you want Lion’s Mane plus two botanicals in a two capsule serve, the Lion’s Mane can’t take up the whole fill. Something has to give, whether that’s the amount of each ingredient, the capsule size or the number of capsules. Sort that out on paper before anyone mixes a gram. It’s the cheapest point in the whole project to change your mind.

Ingredient Compatibility in Lion’s Mane Formulations

Lion’s Mane extract generally blends well. Check anyway.

Density and particle size affect how evenly it mixes. Moisture sensitivity affects storage. Taste matters most in powders and drinks, and flow matters most in capsule filling.

Here’s a cheap habit that catches most problems. Make a small trial batch, store some the way your customer will, and look at it again a few weeks later. Clumping? Colour change? Separation? A shift in taste? Better to find out now than after launch.

Blending Lion’s Mane with other mushroom extracts? Ask every supplier for the same documents: spec sheet, extraction method, dated lab reports. Then you’re comparing like with like.

And keep notes. Which trial batch had which ratio, how it was stored, what changed after three weeks. When you scale up and something behaves differently, those notes are the first place you’ll look, and the first thing your manufacturer will ask for.

Manufacturing Considerations for Custom Lion’s Mane Products

What works in a test batch has to work on the line. Your manufacturer will look at:

• Flow and particle size, for even capsule fills.
• Blend uniformity, so every scoop or capsule carries the same mix.
• Density differences that make ingredients separate.
• Ingredients reacting with each other over time.
• Moisture. Powders hate humidity. We freeze-dry our mushrooms at −82 °C before extraction, so the water’s gone early.
• Batch consistency. Your extract supplier should be able to explain how they keep runs the same.

Why Extract Quality Decides the Result

If the base ingredient drifts, everything you build on it drifts too.

We use fruiting body only. Mycelium grown on grain can carry grain starch into the powder, and we’d rather not sell you starch. Our method is hot-water and ethanol dual extraction on freeze-dried fruiting body, at a 10:1 ratio, every run.

Then there’s testing. Look for reports that name the lab, the sample and the date. Ours cover heavy metals (nine trace elements, analysed by Symbio Laboratories in May 2026 and AEGIC in November 2024) and microbial screening, where RMIT University researchers did not detect E. coli or coliforms in April 2025. On beta-glucans, Symbio measured 32.2 g/100 g in a tested extract blend with 1% BioPerine in May 2026. That figure belongs to that sample.

Your finished blend needs its own testing. It isn’t the same thing as the ingredient.

When you’re comparing extract suppliers, these are the questions we’d ask, and the ones we expect to be asked:

• Is it fruiting body or mycelium, and is anything added, like grain, starch or fillers?
• What’s the extraction method, and what’s the ratio?
• Which lab tested it, on what sample, and when?
• What hasn’t been tested yet?
• Can I see the spec sheet and get samples before I order?

A supplier who goes quiet on any of those is telling you something.

Every result we hold, plus the spec sheet, is on our Lion’s Mane specifications and lab results page.

Working With Us

At Xotic Mushrooms, growing and extraction happen in one business, on one farm in Thomastown. We grow on Tasmanian oak hardwood sawdust and Australian soya husk, harvest the fruiting body and freeze-dry it ourselves.

You get the spec sheet and dated lab reports before you order, not after. You can go white label, with our powder or capsules under your label, or private label, with your own blend, formulation or packaging. Pack sizes on our spec sheet run from 50 g retail pouches to 5 kg bulk. MOQ and lead times? We confirm them on enquiry, based on your format and quantity.

Why does one farm matter to you? Because when you ask how a batch was grown, dried or extracted, the answer comes from the people who did it. No chain of brokers, no guessing which facility a lot came from. If something about your formula needs a tweak, you’re talking to the source.

Tell us the format and target serve, and we’ll tell you how our Lion’s Mane extract fits.

Ingredient Pairings and Where the Category Is Heading

Drink powders keep growing as an alternative to capsules. Multi mushroom blends, combining Lion’s Mane with other species, give brands a broader product story. Nootropic style blends pair Lion’s Mane with botanicals for products positioned around cognitive wellness. Lion’s Mane is often researched for this area, so keep label wording careful.

These are the pairings we see most:

Ingredient Category	Example Pairings	Formulation Purpose
Functional Mushrooms	Reishi, Cordyceps, Chaga	Multi mushroom blends
Botanical Ingredients	Adaptogenic herbs	Botanical wellness formulations
Nutritional Ingredients	Plant proteins, minerals	Functional nutrition powders
Beverage Components	Coffee alternatives, cacao	Functional beverage mixes

Whatever you pair it with, test compatibility, serve balance and shelf life together.

Final Thoughts

Custom takes more decisions than white label. You end up with a product nobody else sells.

Start with a documented extract and the rest gets easier. Ask us for the spec sheet and samples when you’re ready.