The Gummy Game

Tasty chewables are booming, aiming to treat everything from mental fog to menstrual cramps. But are they really helpful? Or just delicious hype?

- Aja Mangum & Chris Rovzar

Cousins Jake Mellman and Stephanie Moyal are on a mission to mainstream mushrooms (the nonpsychedelic kind) by making them sweet and chewable. The idea for their company, Troop, was conceived during the early days of Covid-19—after Mellman shattered his leg in a ski accident, Moyal was furloughed from her hotel job, and the two moved in with his parents. “Stephanie had already been taking mushroom supplements, and I had not been super familiar, but I started to learn and wanted to take them,” Mellman explains. He was interested in their reported properties of enhancing energy, increasing mental clarity, boosting the immune system, and helping regulate stress response. But, he says, “I was taking so many pills from my injury that I just did not want to take any more.”

While recovering he figured others were probably ready to ditch their pills as well—so the pair decided to try gummifying mushrooms to make them “approachable and relatable.”

Troop was launched on Feb. 2, 2022, with the stated goal of “putting the ‘fun’ in fungi.” The pair started out with peachy-mango-flavored Lion’s Mane (energy and mental clarity), mixed-berry Reishi (calm), and strawberry-passion fruit Super Troop, a gummy to treat overall health and well-being that blends reishi, chaga, and turkey tail mushrooms, plus cordyceps, a fungus (all cost $45 per bottle).

In a January report released by market-research and consulting firm InsightAce Analytic Pvt Ltd., the global beauty ingestible market was valued at $3.3 billion in 2021 and was expected to reach $8.3 billion by 2030.