Turkey Tail Extract Much Darker than usual?

That's normal. Nothing to worry about. Natural products, be them plants or fungi, will vary in color naturally.

Look at how different some turkey tail mushrooms are from each other.

So you can see sometimes they might be lighter grey/brown, and other times they will be darker brown or even have a little orange in them. We test every single batch for species and fungal part on our HP-TLC, or high-performance thin layer chromatograph. That is designed to separate compounds into bands, and create a fingerprint of the mushroom. This fingerprint is compared to other known botanical reference materials (BRMs) and extract samples to ensure they match. We can tell any mushroom apart from each other by their HP-TLC fingerprint.

Here is a comparison of an HP-TLC plate of our turkey tail extract on the right, with a raw whole turkey tail mushroom we had verified by a botanist as a BRM on the left. The middle one is a competitor of ours, and it totally fake.

I won't say who the competitor is, but we have analyze a lot of our competitors, and you would be surprised how many are selling completely fake mushrooms! One competitor had EVERY SINGLE MUSHROOM come back fake, except for one. They are using some creative tricks to try and make it look real, but our methods can catch them. I don't want to say how we are doing it, so they can't make better fake ones. However, it's pretty nuts!

Here is what our HP-TLC line looks like.

Then we do beta glucan testing in our lab, too. We use the Megazyme kits to do the sample prep, then we do our own modified methods on our Thermo UV-VIS to quantify using that sample prep. This gives us very accurate measurements of the beta glucans. We have set specs for each mushroom and each extract. If they fall outside those ranges, we do further analysis to figure out why. So we have the full fingerprint from the HP-TLC PLUS the beta glucan testing to be absolutely sure the extract is the correct mushroom. Then on some we are doing UPLC for other active ingredients, like cordycepin in cordyceps. That acts as another fingerprint.

Here are our two UPLCs working. One of them has a mass spec on it as well.

We are in the process of making our own reference standards and standardizations for these mushrooms, too. Turkey tail is one we will be working on. So we are not just waiting for other labs to come along and do it. We are taking up the torch and are going to be setting our own mushroom standards that we will work to make universal in the industry.

So long answer short, you don't ever have to worry about anything you get from us. I make sure we go to great lengths to ensure things are correct looong before anything ever reaches a customer. We are not just doing our due diligence, we are pushing the bar higher than anyone in the world on mushroom analysis.