VISTA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb 4, 2026--
M2 Ingredients, the largest vertically integrated functional mushroom grower and ingredient supplier in the Western Hemisphere, today announced the launch of the M2 Center of Innovation, a state-of-the-art food, beverage, and supplement R&D application lab designed to accelerate innovation and elevate industry standards for functional mushroom product development.
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The M2 Center of Innovation brings together the most experienced functional mushroom R&D teams in the industry with a purpose-built facility to support brands developing next-generation functional foods, beverages, and supplements across formats including RTDs, ready-to-mix powders, gummies, capsules, shots, bars, and more.
“This is a major step forward not just for M2, but for the entire functional mushroom industry,” said Jeff Rogers, CEO of M2 Ingredients. “Brands have historically had to choose between ingredient suppliers and true innovation partners. The M2 Center of Innovation eliminates tradeoff by combining deep scientific rigor with real-world formulation and application expertise. This will be a powerful asset for our partner brands and a catalyst for faster, more confident innovation.”
Unlike traditional application labs, the M2 Center of Innovation is fully integrated with M2’s cultivation, processing, and scientific research teams. This vertical integration allows common formulation challenges such as solubility, suspension, flavor pairing, and sensory performance to be addressed at the ingredient level.
The Center of Innovation will be led by Jay Schmalz, R&D Innovation Manager at M2 Ingredients, and supported by M2’s in-house team of food scientists, formulation experts, and researchers with decades of experience developing functional foods, beverages, and supplements for leading consumer brands.
According to Dr. Sandra Carter, Founder of M2 Ingredients, the launch represents a defining moment for the category.
“This Center of Innovation reflects the infrastructure the functional mushroom space has been missing,” Dr. Carter said. “It is designed to help brands move beyond concepts and into market-ready products that deliver on both efficacy and experience. We believe this will fundamentally change how functional mushroom products are developed and commercialized.”
Chief Science Officer, Dr. Julie Daoust, noted that the Center was shaped by her own experience leading R&D and innovation teams on the consumer brand side earlier in her career.
“This is the partner I always wished I had when I was responsible for bringing new products to market,” said Dr. Daoust. “A team that understands ingredient science, formulation realities, scale-up challenges, and commercialization timelines all at once. The M2 Center of Innovation allows brands to innovate without having to build a full internal R&D infrastructure, while still delivering products that truly work.”
The M2 Center of Innovation is now open and actively collaborating with food, beverage, and supplement brand partners.
About M2 Ingredients
M2 Ingredients is leading the future of functional mushrooms as the most clinically supported functional mushroom ingredient supplier for food, beverage, and supplement brands. Vertically integrated, M2 organically grows and ships from Southern California and is backed by the industry’s largest scientific and R&D team. Visit M2 Ingredients to get samples and create products backed by real science and credible claims.
Inside the M2 Center of Innovation, our food science team brings deep, hands on expertise across brewed coffee, coffee pods, instant coffee, functional beverages, energy drinks, carbonated functional beverages, gummies, chocolate, bars, and more. This team works alongside our partners to turn functional mushroom science into finished products that perform, scale, and win in the market.
M2’s new Center of Innovation will help support the rapidly growing mushroom coffee and functional beverage industry. The M2 team has developed new solutions to reduce settling, enhance bioactivity, and deliver a more neutral flavor profile. The team is ready to partner with coffee, beverage, and food brands of all sizes, supporting them from ideation through production.
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump's administration is expected to unveil its grandest plan yet to rebuild supply chains of critical minerals needed for everything from jet engines to smartphones, likely through purchase agreements with partners on top of creating a $12 billion U.S. strategic reserve to help counter China's dominance.
Vice President JD Vance is set to deliver a keynote address Wednesday at a meeting that Secretary of State Marco Rubio is hosting with officials from several dozen European, Asian and African nations. The U.S. is expected to sign deals on supply chain logistics, though details have not been revealed. Rubio met Tuesday with foreign ministers from South Korea and India to discuss critical minerals mining and processing.
The meeting and expected agreements will come just two days after Trump announced Project Vault, or a stockpile of critical minerals to be funded with a $10 billion loan from the U.S. Export-Import Bank and nearly $1.67 billion in private capital.
Trump's Republican administration is making such bold moves after China, which controls 70% of the world’s rare earths mining and 90% of the processing, choked off the flow of the elements in response to Trump’s tariff war. The two superpowers are in a one-year truce after Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping met in October and agreed to pull back on high tariffs and stepped-up rare earth restrictions.
But China’s limits remain tighter than they were before Trump took office.
“We don’t want to ever go through what we went through a year ago,” Trump said on Monday when announcing Project Vault.
Other countries might join with the Trump administration in buying up critical minerals and taking other steps to spur industry development because the trade war revealed how vulnerable Western countries are to China, said Pini Althaus, who founded Oklahoma rare earth miner USA Rare Earth in 2019.
“They’re looking at setting up sort of a buyers’ club, if you will,” said Althaus, who now is working to develop new mines in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan as CEO of Cove Capital. “The key producers and key consumers of critical minerals will sort of get together and work on pricing structures, floor pricing and other things.”
The government last week also made its fourth direct investment in an American critical minerals producer when it extended $1.6 billion to USA Rare Earth in exchange for stock and a repayment agreement.
Seeking government funding these days is like meeting with private equity investors because officials are scrutinizing companies to ensure anyone they invest in can deliver, Althaus said. And the government is demanding terms designed to generate a return for taxpayers as loans are repaid and stock prices increase, he said.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Export-Import Bank's board this week approved the $10 billion loan — the largest in its history — to help finance the setup of the U.S. Strategic Critical Minerals Reserve. It is tasked with ensuring access to critical minerals and related products for manufacturers, including battery maker Clarios, energy equipment manufacturer GE Vernova, digital storage company Western Digital and aerospace giant Boeing, according to the policy bank.
Bank President and Chairman John Jovanovic told CNBC that the project creates a public-private partnership formula that “is uniquely suited and puts America's best foot forward.”
"What it does is it creates a scenario where there are no free riders. Everybody pitches in to solve this huge problem,” he said.
Manufacturers, which benefit the most from the reserve, are making a long-term financial commitment, Jovanovic said, while the government loan spurs private investments.
The stockpile strategy may help spark a “more organic” pricing model that excludes China, which has used its dominance to flood the market with lower-priced products to squeeze out competitors, said Wade Senti, president of the U.S. permanent magnet company AML.
The Trump administration also has injected public money directly into the sector. The Pentagon has shelled out nearly $5 billion over the past year to help ensure its access to the materials after the trade war laid bare just how beholden the U.S. is to China.
A bipartisan group of lawmakers last month proposed creating a new agency with $2.5 billion to spur production of rare earths and the other critical minerals. The lawmakers applauded the steps by the Trump administration.
“It’s a clear sign that there is bipartisan support for securing a robust domestic supply of critical minerals that both reduces our reliance on China and stabilizes the market,” Sens. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., and Todd Young, R-Ind., said in a joint statement Tuesday.
Building up a stockpile will help American companies weather future rare earth supply disruptions, but that will likely be a long-term effort because the materials are still scarce right now with China's restrictions, said David Abraham, a rare earths expert who has followed the industry for decades and wrote the book “The Elements of Power.”
The Trump administration has focused on reinvigorating critical minerals production, but Abraham said it's also important to encourage development of manufacturing that will use them. He noted that Trump’s decisions to cut incentives for electric vehicles and wind turbines have undercut demand for these elements in America.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, right, meets with South Korea's Foreign Minister Cho Hyun at the State Department in Washington, Tuesday, Feb. 3, 2026. (AP Photo/Nathan Howard)
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, right, shakes hands with India's External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar at the State Department in Washington, Tuesday, Feb. 3, 2026. (AP Photo/Nathan Howard)
