Ananda Elixirs Review: Is a $33 Undosed Mushroom Soda Worth It?

Our analysis of Ananda Elixirs: the formulas under the microscope

This page is an analysis of the official product pages, the nutrition panel, the FAQ, the shipping policy and the refund policy. It is not a physical test, and we say so plainly because the brand's own pages leave a gap that tasting would not fill.

📌 Shroom Soda

Shroom Soda is the product everything else hangs on. It is a 2 fl oz dropper bottle holding 60 ml of liquid concentrate, which the brand counts as about thirty servings of 2 ml. Two full droppers go into 12 oz of sparkling water and the result is a soda with no sugar, no caffeine and no calories, sweetened with organic stevia.

The ingredient line is short: extracts of cordyceps, turkey tail, lion's mane and reishi, water, alcohol, flavor concentrate and stevia extract. Seven flavors are on sale, from Cream Soda and Root Beer to Lavender Lemonade and Cranberry Ginger. The US storefront prices every one of them at $33.00, which is $1.10 a glass.

The commercial structure around that bottle matters as much as the bottle. A one time purchase is $33.00, a subscription takes 20 percent off at $26.40 and ships every 30, 45, 60 or 90 days with the option to skip, and a sampler tier exists in the catalog data at $11.25 a bottle although its page returns a 404 on the US store. So the cheapest honest way to try the product is not the one the navigation pushes you toward, and the second cheapest is a subscription you then have to remember to pause.

The dropper itself is worth a line. The brand leaves a small amount of mushroom residue in the liquid rather than filtering it out, which means the bottle needs a shake before use, and the alcohol base gives it a three year shelf life. One contradiction shows up here: the product page states that no refrigeration is needed while the site disclaimer says to refrigerate after opening. Neither is dangerous, but a buyer reading both pages ends up guessing.

What the page never provides is a quantity. Not a milligram figure, not an extraction ratio, not a beta glucan percentage, not even the order of the four species by weight beyond what the ingredient list implies. The panel on the bottle is a Canadian Nutrition Facts table measured per 2 ml, and it reads zero on every line, which is true and tells a buyer nothing about the mushrooms.

📌 Mushroom Mocktails

The second line swaps the blend rather than the format. Mushroom Mocktails runs on lion's mane, chaga and reishi, so chaga appears here and nowhere else, while cordyceps and turkey tail drop out. Three flavors are sold, Bliss Spritz, Piña Colada and Sangria Siesta, each with a published recipe involving juice, ice and proper glassware.

The price is identical at $33.00 for about thirty drinks, and the line is marked organic, vegan, non GMO and gluten free. A launch offer puts one bottle of each flavor at $65.25 against $87.00 shown struck through, which works out to $21.75 a bottle and is the cheapest way into the range. The dosing silence is the same as on the soda.

This line is better built than the soda in one respect. Each flavor comes with a full recipe rather than a suggestion, so Bliss Spritz is served in a stemmed wine glass with an ounce of fresh orange juice, 6 oz of sparkling water and an orange wheel, and the other two follow the same pattern. That is the difference between selling a concentrate and selling an evening ritual, and it is the smartest thing the brand does.

It also creates the range's sharpest contradiction. A product aimed squarely at people skipping alcohol is itself an alcohol based tincture, roughly 25 percent before dilution. The finished glass lands near 0.2 percent, well under the 0.5 percent ceiling a drink has to stay below to be sold as non alcoholic in the United States, so the labeling is defensible. It still deserves to be stated on the page rather than buried in an FAQ answer, because the people most likely to care are exactly the people this line targets.

📌 The bundles, and what they actually save

Two bundles sit above the singles and they do not behave the same way. Build Your Own Bundle starts at $27.55 a bottle and is a genuine discount. The Classic Soda Bundle is the one to check twice: it lists at $145.00 for four bottles that cost $132.00 bought one at a time on the US store. That price makes sense on the Canadian store, where four bottles at CA$39.00 come to CA$156.00, and it has simply not been rebuilt for the American storefront.

The verdict on format and dosing

These two findings pull in opposite directions and both are real. The format is genuinely the best execution we have seen of a daily mushroom drink, because it removes the two things that end most routines, the preparation and the taste. Nothing to whisk, nothing earthy to hide, ten flavors across the range and a bottle small enough to carry.

The dosing is the opposite. A buyer cannot establish whether a serving carries 50 mg of extract or 500 mg, and that is the definition of the fairy dusting risk on a product where mushrooms are the headline. The brand is not hiding behind a proprietary blend, it simply never publishes an amount, and a flavor concentrate diluted into a drink is exactly the format where a token quantity would go unnoticed.

Effectiveness and what to expect

Credit where it is due on the claims language. The site describes lion's mane as traditionally used in practices associated with focus and clarity, and reishi as associated with calm and balance, which is careful phrasing that stays on the right side of the line. We found none of the absolute promises that usually need editing out of a mushroom brand's copy, no percentage of absorption, no cognitive claims, no immune promises. The restraint is real and it is unusual in this category.

We will not tell you what these drops will do, and neither does the company, which registers its products as food and not as dietary supplements. That classification is the honest explanation for the missing numbers: a food carries a Nutrition Facts table, a supplement carries a Supplement Facts panel with amounts. Expect a pleasant zero sugar drink you will keep making. Expect nothing measurable from the mushrooms until the brand publishes a figure.

Who is Ananda Elixirs?

Ananda Elixirs was founded by Dylan and Samantha Dreiling, a couple whose previous wellness business collapsed in early 2021, in the same stretch that Samantha lost her father. The story the brand tells is that the idea came out of a long drive and a single question about what they would do if they followed what actually interested them. Dylan was reading about functional mushrooms, Samantha could not stand powdered supplements, and the first product came out of that gap.

The company grew in Arizona for roughly eighteen months, then moved home to Ottawa, Ontario in August 2024, where it is run today. Manufacturing sits in California. The founders appeared on Dragon's Den, the Canadian equivalent of Shark Tank, which is a verifiable milestone rather than a marketing line. What is harder to verify is the audience claim: the same site advertises 10,000, 30,000 and 40,000 customers on three different pages, and there is no Trustpilot profile to check any of them against.

Structurally the business runs as two companies as far as a shopper is concerned. There is a Canadian entity behind anandaelixirs.com and an American one behind us.anandaelixirs.com, each with its own catalog, its own currency and its own checkout, plus a British store on a third domain. Customer contact is a single email address, contact@anandaelixirs.com, with no phone line and no live chat, and the brand is active on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok.

Shroom Soda against a standard mushroom powder

The table makes the trade explicit. On everything that decides whether a product gets used, Shroom Soda wins: it mixes into cold water in two seconds, it has no caffeine so it can be drunk at nine in the evening, it carries no sugar, and ten flavors across the range mean a buyer does not get bored by week three. That last point is not decoration. Taste fatigue is one of the two reasons daily supplement routines stop, the other being the taste itself, and this format neutralizes both.

On price it also holds up. At $1.10 a serving, or $0.99 with our code LMC, it sits under most of the mushroom coffee powders we cover, several of which land between $1.30 and $2.60 a cup. The comparison flips completely on the one row that matters to anyone buying for the mushrooms rather than for the drink. A competent powder prints grams of extract per serving and increasingly prints a beta glucan percentage. This bottle prints zeros on a nutrition table and stops.

There is also a row the table cannot hold. The concentrate is roughly a quarter alcohol before dilution, which leaves about 0.2 percent in a finished 8 oz glass. That is a small number and a real one. A powder contains none, and for anyone avoiding alcohol for medical reasons or in recovery, that difference is the deciding factor rather than a footnote. It deserves more visibility than the FAQ gives it, particularly on a mocktail line sold to people skipping a drink.

Set against mushroom coffee specifically, which is the comparison most of our readers will actually make, the gap is about what you are replacing. A mushroom coffee is trying to be your morning cup and usually brings caffeine, a roast profile and a printed extract weight. Shroom Soda is trying to be the can you open at four in the afternoon, brings no caffeine at all and prints nothing. Those are different jobs, and a reader who wants both will end up buying both rather than choosing.

One last practical difference: a powder tub sits in a cupboard, this bottle fits in a bag. Several of the brand's own customer quotes describe ordering soda water at a bar and dosing it at the table, which is a use case no powder supports, and it is the single most convincing argument the format has.

The Ananda Elixirs range

The catalog is short and stays short, which is coherent for a company of this size. Two concentrate lines, ten flavors between them, two bundles, and a store locator pointing at a handful of physical stockists. There is no capsule, no powder and no ready to drink can, and the brand has resisted the usual temptation to bolt on a collagen or a greens product.

📌 Key commitments

• Fruiting body extracts only, triple extracted with ultrasonic equipment
• Turkey tail wild foraged, lion's mane and reishi organic and log grown
• Mushrooms cultivated through agroforestry rather than on grain substrate
• Every batch tested by a third party for heavy metals and contaminants
• No refined sugar, no caffeine, no artificial sweeteners or colors

Composition breakdown: what the formulas are actually made of

The mushroom side, species by species

Four species carry the soda line and three carry the mocktails, with lion's mane and reishi common to both, cordyceps and turkey tail exclusive to the soda, and chaga exclusive to the mocktails. Each one is described as fruiting body only and triple extracted, which is a meaningful distinction against the mycelium on grain that fills the cheap end of this market, and the log grown claim on lion's mane and reishi points to a slow cultivation method. None of that survives contact with the missing numbers. Fairy dusting cannot be ruled out here, not because the brand makes a suspect claim but because it makes no quantified claim at all, and a flavored concentrate is precisely where a token amount would hide.

Everything that sits around the mushrooms

The rest of the bottle is water, alcohol, plant derived flavor concentrate and stevia extract. The alcohol is not incidental, it is the extraction solvent and it stays in the product at roughly 25 percent of the tincture, under 0.5 ml per serving. Some mushroom residue is deliberately left unfiltered, which the FAQ presents as a choice rather than a flaw. There is no preservative, no added color and no sugar of any kind.

Buying Ananda Elixirs from the United States

This is where the brand does well and where it trips over its own setup. Ananda Elixirs ships to the United States and Canada and to nowhere else, and American orders leave a domestic US facility, which means no duties and no import fees. Processing runs one to three business days and transit two to seven. We priced a single bottle to a California address and the cheapest option came back at $6.00 by USPS Ground Advantage, with UPS Ground at $6.65. Standard shipping turns free from three bottles.

The complication is that the company runs two separate storefronts. The Canadian site sells in Canadian dollars and quoted us no shipping option at all for an American address, while the US site at us.anandaelixirs.com sells in dollars and does fulfill domestically. A creator link opens the Canadian store, so anyone arriving that way needs the currency selector in the header to reach the American one. Returns are a 30 day guarantee limited to a first bottle, one per household, with shipping never refunded.

Technical analysis and expert verdict

Strip away the branding, which is the best in this group by a distance, and two facts decide this review. Ananda Elixirs has built the only format in our catalog that turns a glass of sparkling water into a soda in two seconds, at $1.10 a serving, delivered domestically in under a week. That is a genuinely useful product for anyone trying to drop a two can a day habit, and it is the reason the brand is worth covering at all.

Against that, the label answers none of the questions a mushroom buyer would ask, the product page repeats a Canadian price per drink on an American storefront, one bundle costs more than the bottles it contains, and the customer count changes depending on which page you read. Those are not fatal, but together they describe a company whose marketing is running well ahead of its documentation. That gap is what puts it at 7.4/10.

👉 Our advice: buy it as a soda replacement you will actually keep drinking, use code LMC or compare it against the 20 percent subscription rate, and do not buy it as your source of lion's mane until the brand publishes milligrams per serving.