Shrooming Is Booming: How Chaga Was Cast As Nature’s Immune Ally

At Biohacker Summit 2020 Helsinki, Hardi Põder Presented Chaga Not As A Wellness Fad, But As A Forest-Born Organism Rooted In Tradition, Scarcity, And Scientific Ambition

In a year defined by viral fear and a global obsession with resilience, Hardi Põder arrived at Biohacker Summit 2020 Helsinki with a message that was both ancient and acutely contemporary: if people wanted to strengthen their immunity, they might do well to look not to the laboratory first, but to the forest.

Speaking on Friday, 16 October 2020, in Helsinki, Finland, the Estonian mushroom cultivator and founder of Chaga Health made the case for medicinal mushrooms, especially chaga, as one of nature’s most potent immune-supporting substances. His presentation, titled Shrooming Is Booming! - Medicinal Mushrooms To Boost Immunity, blended folklore, forest economics, biochemistry and entrepreneurial zeal.

Põder did not merely describe chaga as useful. He elevated it. “Chaga is the king of medicinal mushrooms,” he said, calling it “one of the rarest species with more than two hundred bioactive components that act as a powerful immune system booster.”

The Mushroom That Refused To Be Ordinary

The force of Põder’s argument rested first on rarity. Chaga, he explained, was unlike the more familiar functional mushrooms that could be cultivated in controlled indoor systems. Reishi, shiitake and maitake had become staples of modern mushroom farming. Chaga had not.

That was because chaga depended on a living birch tree and a clean northern environment. It thrived, he suggested, precisely where modern industry had not fully intruded. Estonia, with its harsh winters, short summers, clean air and organic forest cover, became in his telling not just a backdrop but a biological partner.

“The best chaga lies deep in the forest, untouched by pollution,” he said, describing the search for it as a task requiring “time, effort, and mindfulness”.

There was something almost moral in the way Põder framed the harvest. Chaga, he stressed, should be gathered without damaging the host tree. The tree must live, the cycle must continue, and the mushroom must return. “We care for the forest like it cares for us,” he said, “ensuring that the cycle continues so the land remains rich with natural resources.”

Estonia’s Forests As Laboratory And Legacy

Põder’s authority came not only from performance but from biography. He had spent more than a decade in medicinal mushroom cultivation, beginning in 2007 with Estonia’s first shiitake and reishi farm. In 2009, he trained in Belgium at a leading mushroom laboratory, later becoming an internationally certified expert and a member of the International Society for Mushroom Science.

Yet his talk leaned as much on inheritance as expertise. Again and again, he returned to ancestral knowledge. Old Estonians, he said, had long brewed chaga to support health and immunity. “Our forefathers knew how to listen to nature,” he said. “And when you know how to listen to nature, you find everything that you are seeking for.”

That phrase could easily have dissolved into cliché. In Helsinki, it instead formed the emotional core of his presentation. Põder was not asking the audience to reject modernity. He was asking them to recover something it had obscured.

Ancient Remedy, Modern Validation

Still, he knew that folklore alone was not enough, especially in a market crowded with unsupported claims. One of the more striking tensions in the talk was his acknowledgment that contemporary health language demanded evidence, not romance.

Since 2000, he said, scientific publications on chaga had increased dramatically. But broader validation was still needed. That, he argued, was the next frontier: translating inherited belief into clinical proof.

To do that, Põder said, Estonian efforts had entered into cooperation with a mushroom laboratory in Denver to study chaga more rigorously, including how it interacted with the human body and how it might support immune function.

This was the bridge his presentation tried to build: from the brew of grandparents to the metrics of modern science. “We take the best from the past and present,” he said, “combining a hundred-year-old family recipe with the latest research to produce an elixir that makes no compromises.”

The Bioactive Mystique Of Chaga

Part of chaga’s appeal, in Põder’s account, lay in the sheer density of what it contained. He described it as carrying more than 200 bioactive compounds, including superoxide dismutase, terpenoids and melanin, while also pointing to its antioxidant and mineral profile. He further claimed that chaga produced vitamin D in a manner analogous to human skin responding to sunlight.

The cumulative effect of this list was not simply scientific. It was theatrical. Chaga was presented not as one supplement among many, but as a wild biological archive, loaded with compounds modern consumers were only beginning to appreciate.

And Põder understood the cultural moment perfectly. The rise of immune health, the language of natural resilience, the suspicion of overprocessed solutions, all of it gave medicinal mushrooms an almost mythic timeliness. “Shrooming is booming,” he declared, in what became the talk’s most memorable line, “and you have to boost your immune system in this era to ensure your well-being.”

Building The World’s Biggest Chaga Plantation

If the first half of the presentation was about wonder, the second was about scale.

Once Põder and his company recognized chaga’s commercial and medicinal potential, they encountered a practical obstacle: supply. Because chaga could not be farmed like conventional mushrooms, securing enough raw material required a different kind of agricultural imagination.

His solution was ambitious. Through a dedicated fund, he said, his team was establishing what he described as the world’s largest chaga plantation in Estonia. At the time of the presentation, there were already 369 individual chaga plantations in the country, and the broader plan aimed to extend cultivation across more than 2,300 hectares, yielding access to roughly 1,000 tons of raw material a year.

This was not the language of a niche herbalist. It was the language of infrastructure.

And yet Põder framed the project less as extraction than as stewardship. Planting chaga dowels, waiting years for harvest, and preserving the forest ecosystem were all part of a long-cycle model that sought legitimacy through sustainability.

The Elixir Economy

Põder also turned to products. Since 2014, he said, Chaga Health had developed organic chaga elixirs based on a century-old recipe from south Estonia, fortified with berries and herbs including sea buckthorn, blackcurrant and rosehip.

Here, his argument became especially strategic. Because chaga itself did not yet carry approved European health claims, the formulations drew their certified immunity language from the vitamin C contributed by those added ingredients. It was, as he admitted with some candour, a matter of understanding what could be claimed scientifically and legally.

The result was a product that tried to inhabit two worlds at once: one of folklore and one of regulation. It was marketed not as an act of mysticism, but as an evidence-aware adaptation of tradition.

A Forest Message For An Anxious Time

In the end, what made Põder’s appearance at Biohacker Summit 2020 Helsinki notable was not simply that he praised medicinal mushrooms. Many had done that before. It was that he positioned chaga at the intersection of ecology, immunity, memory and commerce.

He spoke as a farmer, a businessman, a student of mushroom science and, at moments, almost as a custodian of northern folklore. His message was shaped by the anxieties of October 2020, when the pandemic had made immune health a shared preoccupation. But it was also shaped by a deeper idea: that modern well-being might depend on recovering relationships with landscapes that had long sustained human life.

“Remember to listen to nature,” his biography urged. In Helsinki, that sentiment became more than a slogan. In Põder’s telling, it was an operating principle, one that stretched from the birch forests of Estonia to the clinical ambitions of Denver, and from old family brews to a wellness economy eager for the next miracle.

Whether chaga would ultimately fulfil every promise attached to it remained, as ever, a question for science. But at Biohacker Summit 2020 Helsinki, Hardi Põder made one thing unmistakably clear: in the age of immunity, the mushroom had already stepped out of the shadows.

Frequently asked questions

Why can chaga not be farmed like other mushrooms?

Because it depends on a living birch tree and a clean northern environment. Reishi, shiitake and maitake have become staples of modern indoor cultivation, Hardi Põder explained, while chaga has resisted that, which is the source of its scarcity.

What is Põder's background?

More than a decade in medicinal mushroom cultivation, beginning in 2007 with Estonia's first shiitake and reishi farm. In 2009 he trained in Belgium at a leading mushroom laboratory, later becoming an internationally certified expert.

Is tradition enough to justify the claims?

He was clear that it is not, particularly in a market crowded with unsupported assertions, which is why the talk moved from folklore toward the question of what modern validation for the traditional remedy actually exists.

About the event

This recap is part of the Biohacker Summit 2020 Helsinki series, recorded in Helsinki on 16 and 17 October 2020. Read the summary of the whole event or join the next edition, HOLOLIFE Summit 2026 Amsterdam, on 14 and 15 November 2026.