Our Wellness Department is thrilled to carry GO Mushroom tinctures, made right in Hudson, NY!
Within only a few minutes of speaking with Charlene Chai, CEO and Founding Partner of GO Mushrooms, you can tell that she is passionate about building relationships with her customers and helping them improve their health.
Charlene comes from a strategic business background, and has consulted for many Hudson Valley businesses. She was first introduced to medicinal mushrooms when she was approached to help raise capital for Tivoli Mushrooms, a mushroom farm located in a warehouse near the Hudson waterfront.
“I was really fascinated by what Devon Gilroy, the CEO and founder of Tivoli Mushrooms, was doing and could just see the potential in it,” she says. “I became one of the investors because I believed in what Devon was doing and felt this was something I could help to grow. I also saw the potential to build GO Mushrooms from the roots of Tivoli Mushrooms as I really wanted to work on something that was incredibly healing.”
In the early stages of the company, Charlene had a laboratory set up in her garage and went to every farmers market she could to talk with customers about the benefits of medicinal mushrooms. While mushrooms are beneficial as food, they also have compounds like high-density polysaccharides, beta-glucans, and triterpenes in their cells that human bodies aren’t able to break down and absorb in the digestive process. The GO Mushroom team uses distinct extraction techniques to access these nutrients for their medicinal tinctures.
“Mushrooms are used for medicine in over 40% of pharmaceuticals in one form or another” Charlene explains. “Think of penicillin and statins for cholesterol. What we’re doing is taking this out of the pharmaceutical realm and trying to demystify what is happening.”
Charlene has seen the impact of GO Mushroom tinctures in her own life, as well as hearing stories from customers. GO Mushrooms currently offers six varieties of tinctures, and Charlene easily speaks of the benefits of each one. Nervous systems issues or early dementia? Lions Mane helps repair brain and nervous system cells. Want an extra boost for your workout? Try Cordyceps. Want to improve your cholesterol? Take Maitake. While these tinctures may or may not act as a cure for medical conditions, she says consistent use of the tinctures helps to raise the baseline of a person’s health, giving them an immune boost, extra energy, balanced hormones, and more.
While there are a variety of medicinal mushroom products on the market, Charlene says what distinguishes GO Mushrooms is the intention and integrity the team brings to their tinctures. Many large medicinal mushroom companies buy in their mushroom extractions to add to a formula with other ingredients and lack transparency on what exactly in in their products. In contrast, GO Mushrooms has a hand in the entire process, from growing their medicinal mushrooms at their own local farm to extracting in their own laboratory in Hudson.
“It’s like the difference when someone cooks with anger and indifference versus when someone cooks with love,” she says. “Our tinctures are made with real intent to be healing, and we’ve priced these so that people can afford them because I want these to be out there and healing people. And if we make money because of that, well that’s a good thing too.”
You can view the entire GO Mushrooms product line and keep up with new developments (like the hot chocolate powder in R&D), here.
