Wild Harvest Mushrooms: Case Study TruNorth Naturals
- Rache Brand
- 1 day ago
- 6 min read
TruNorth and Superstruct are scaling a regenerative economy, redefining how the world sees wild harvested mushrooms as ingredients.
What began as a personal calling for founder Cody McElrea has become a multi-line business model generating over $800K in 2023 with a clear path to $10M+ in 2025 revenue, a $1B pharma (therapeutic) upside within five years. Rooted in regenerative forestry and ethical sourcing, TruNorth is now building a vertically integrated ecosystem of companies designed to transform the health, pharma, and food industries.
Key Metrics (2023–2024)
2023 Revenue: $835K
2025 Projected Revenue: $10M+ (12x growth)
Gross Margin: 54% average across B2B wild mushroom products
Active Forager Network: 80+ certified wild harvesters
Number of SKUs: 20+ wild mushroom-based products
Geographies: Canada, U.S., EU (expanding)
TruNorth’s growth isn’t just financial; it’s ecological, systemic, and deeply relational. What we’re witnessing is a company that honors the source, respects the cycle, and builds regenerative infrastructure while scaling new markets.
A Story Rooted in the Forest: Wild Harvest Mushrooms
Cody McElrea, founder of TruNorth Naturals, has spent his life in the forest. First as a forager, then as a systems builder. Born and raised in northern Canada, McElrea grew up immersed in the rhythms of the land, learning from nature’s intelligence long before it became part of a business thesis.
In founding TruNorth, his vision was clear: create a business model that values non-timber forest products not as waste, but as essential assets. The forestry industry manages vast tracts of land, but it ignores what doesn’t fit into the mill economy. Chaga, willow bracket, medicinal fungi, most of it is discarded, despite its value.
TruNorth began with chaga. What started as a small-scale harvest operation has evolved into a full-scale supply chain that includes business-to-business sales across cosmetics, pet food, food and beverage, supplements, and now pharma-grade nutraceuticals. But it’s not just product, it’s protection. Cody is proving the economic viability of what was once considered forest waste.
To shift the narrative around forest value, McElrea built a distributed data collection system, stretching from Ontario to Nova Scotia, that uses trained cruiser teams to identify and document yields of non-timber forest products. The data these teams collect has already influenced forest management decisions across more than one million acres.
Where once these trees would have been felled or mulched, the documentation of high-value mushroom species has given land managers a reason to keep them standing.
“We’ve protected over a million acres because we could show that standing forests are worth more than cut ones.” – Cody McElrea
The company’s commitment to traceability goes far beyond compliance. TruNorth’s proprietary tracking system uses GPS coordinates, forager logs, and harvest timing to link every ingredient to a known source. This not only increases trust and transparency, but it also provides leverage in regulatory and land management conversations.
As demand grows across global wellness, food, and pharmaceutical sectors, TruNorth is building infrastructure to meet it. The latest breakthrough is in micronization technology, a proprietary process that makes whole mushrooms bioavailable without the need for traditional extraction.
In collaboration with formulation partners and researchers, TruNorth is testing a bioavailable powder made from whole mushrooms like chaga and willow bracket. The goal: outperform imported extracts on both efficacy and cost, while preserving the integrity of the full organism. Micronization lets us compete with extract pricing from overseas, but with a whole, cleaner, North American-grown product.
This innovation positions TruNorth to unlock the next phase of industry evolution, where mushrooms are not only functional foods but clinical-grade bioactives. The shift will enable broader application in cancer recovery, metabolic health, and immune modulation, all while keeping value creation within regional economies.
Yet the most distinctive part of McElrea’s leadership may be his philosophical clarity. TruNorth does not view the forest as a resource to extract from, but as a living network to align with.
“We’re not extractors; we’re stewards. Our job is to bring the forest into the future, intact and thriving.” – Cody McElrea
The company's operating philosophy is deeply mycelial:
Every partner, every product, and every venture is connected to a shared source. Whether through education, technology, or direct harvest, TruNorth is designing a diverse, interconnected, and resilient business model that behaves like a forest.
As the company scales into new verticals like TruTheru, TruHarvesters, and TruMarketplace, McElrea remains focused on the original intent: to regenerate more than just land. To regenerate supply chains, livelihoods, and ways of relating to nature.
Strategic Evolution: From Chaga to Ecosystem
By 2021, TruNorth had become a trusted wholesale supplier. But the opportunity, and the pressure, was growing. The functional mushroom market was booming, but also being flooded by mass producers cutting corners. TruNorth stood out for its traceability, ethics, and quality, but it needed a structure to scale.
Enter Rache Brand, a systems strategist and regenerative investor who joined as a board member in 2023 after three years of informal support through Lisa Borden and The Wellness Intelligence Collective. Rache brought structure, clarity, and alignment.
“We didn’t want to grow in ways that diluted Cody’s mission. We wanted to scale the right things: traceability, ecological integrity, and regenerative revenue.” – Rache
With Superstruct’s advisory support, the company restructured its operations around a set of foundational truths:
Nature knows best. All innovation must return to nature as a reference point.
Revenue is the first round. Before raising capital, a business must prove value.
Ecosystems outperform empires. Multiple aligned ventures working in symbiosis outperform top-down models.
The Technology: Mapping the Mycelial Network
Scaling a wild harvest mushroom business isn’t easy. Nature doesn’t scale like a factory. To grow ethically, Cody and his team had to rethink how harvesting worked.
The first breakthrough was yield optimization. By restructuring how mushrooms were harvested, focusing on tree health, forest stand maturity, and return cycle modeling, TruNorth increased annual yield potential without increasing total biomass extraction. It was about harvesting smarter, not harder.
Then came the tech layer. TruNorth built a proprietary traceability system that uses GPS, QR codes, and batch-specific COAs to track every mushroom back to the tree. This isn’t just for marketing, it’s for forest health, compliance, and future regulatory positioning. As governments crack down on ingredient sourcing, TruNorth is already years ahead.
“Our technology gives us two things. It gives us trust, and it gives us data. And those two things are the currency of the future supply chain.” – Cody McElrea
The Structure: TruNorth as Root System
Out of this growth came a bigger realization: TruNorth was no longer a company. It was a root system. To scale without compromising, new structures were needed. The team designed a new model, a constellation of purpose-aligned entities flowing value through TruNorth.
Four new ventures were born:
TruTheru – Pharma-grade mushroom extracts and IP development
TruSource – Global network for wild and ethically sourced ingredients
TruHarvesters – Tools, training, and tech for North America’s decentralized forager network
TruMarketplace – B2B trading hub for verified regenerative goods
Each is independently operable but flows raw material, infrastructure, and brand equity through TruNorth. Each also opens the door to outside operators and investors without compromising the forest-first principles.
The Pharmaceutical Path: $1B in View
Among the new ventures, TruTheru is the crown jewel. Led by Cody & Branden Walsh with close support from Rache, and Dr. Gabriele (a pharma veteran turned believer in natural molecules), TruTheru is validating and commercializing high-purity bioactives like chaga and willow bracket.
Dr. Gabriele explains: “There are three compounds for muscle growth: creatine, steroids, and ketasia. Ketasia, which we’re extracting from willow bracket, might be the most effective. And it’s natural.” [40% of all cancer patients die due to muscle loss.]
The TruPharma model blends traditional wisdom with clinical rigor:
Micronization to increase bioavailability
Oxalate reduction for safety and tolerability
Clinical research for cancer recovery, immunology, and aging
IP strategy for process, application, and combination use
With proprietary extraction methods and initial off-take discussions already underway, TruPharma projects $50M+ in revenue within 36 months, with multi-billion dollar exit potential. And because all raw material flows through TruNorth, the original forest-first thesis remains intact.
Mycelial Metaphor: A Philosophy for Governance
What makes TruNorth different isn’t just the model, it’s the mindset.
“Our relationship is mycelial,” Cody says. “We’re all trying to get back to the same energy source. That’s why this works. It’s not about control. It’s about coherence.”
This philosophy informs every level of governance:
No extractive investor behavior
Operators must be embedded in the land, not just in spreadsheets
Every newco must regenerate the parent, not compete with it
This is rare air in modern business. And it’s working.
TruNorth’s board is currently undergoing reorganization. All current members have been asked to declare their path forward, and it was met with 100% desire to stay and continue building. This governance clarity allows the business to bring in new operators and capital while staying clean, focused, and founder-aligned.
In parallel, the company is preparing for a capital raise in late 2025 to fund:
GMP facility and micronization equipment
Clinical trial partnerships
Licensing and regulatory filings
Product development and market entry
Forager expansion and ecosystem infrastructure
The capital strategy prioritizes values-aligned capital and includes shared upside models, royalty structures, and long-term equity participation for harvesters and early contributors.
A New Kind of Business
TruNorth is not just a mushroom company. It is a regeneration company.
It regenerates forests, communities, science, and trust. It invites capital to act as a steward, not an extractor. And it shows what’s possible when you let nature, not spreadsheets, set the standard.
“We’re not building to exit. We’re building to stay. To heal. To return. And that’s the real billion-dollar opportunity.” – Rache Brand, Board Member for TruNorth Naturals
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