What I'm working on.
I'm co-founding Highland Mushrooms — a 60,000 sq ft cGMP-certified facility in Marion, North Carolina that grows and extracts standardized, third-party verified functional-mushroom ingredients for supplement brands, formulators, and contract manufacturers. We launch in 2026.
Nutraceutical ingredients, manufactured to pharmaceutical standard.
Highland's primary cultivar is Hericium erinaceus — Lion's Mane — the species the facility is purpose-built around. We grow it on-site from authenticated dikaryotic culture, then extract in the same building to a standardized specification. Polysaccharides, erinacines, and beta-glucans are quantified on every lot.
Every batch is a piece of someone else's formulation, and someone else's reputation.
That sentence has shaped almost every decision we've made about the build-out. Sterile environment throughout the facility. Independent verification on every lot. Full traceability from raw substrate to finished powder. Material that doesn't meet our internal standard doesn't leave the building.
Grown and extracted under the same roof.
The facility is one of a small number of US-based, cGMP-certified nutraceutical extract producers operating at commercial scale. Cultivation halls feed directly into the extraction floor and the analytical lab — a closed loop, end to end, on a single site.
Low-temperature air-drying preserves heat-sensitive compounds. Material is standardized to compound concentration via UHPLC, not weight. Pallet quantities for commercial production; samples for evaluation.
Four standards. Above standard.
D · CertificationsUSDA Organic
Certified by Quality Assurance International.
cGMP Certified
Dietary supplement cGMP per 21 CFR Part 111. Annual third-party audit.
UHPLC Verified
On-site analytical lab. Compound assay and COA on every lot.
Kosher & Vegan
Star-K certification. Plant-based throughout the pipeline.
Built by people who've done this for decades.
I'm building Highland alongside Dan Hodges and Dr. John Holliday — the two of them bring more than forty years of combined leadership in mycological research, extract design, quality assurance, and pharmaceutical-grade production. My role sits on the business and go-to-market side: the part of the work that gets a real product out the door of a real building, into the hands of formulators who depend on it.
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Dr. John Holliday
Co-founder · Chief Scientific Officer
Ph.D. mycology · 50+ peer-reviewed papers -
Dan Hodges
Co-founder · Chief Executive
Marion, NC build-out · Certifications program -
Matt Duerstock
Co-founder · Launch & Operations
Brand, commercial, go-to-market