Two founders.
One mission.

Joe came to cannabinoid science the long way around. In 2010, while undergoing cancer treatment, he found that conventional oil-based cannabinoid delivery wasn't producing the consistent absorption his treatment regimen required. The standard delivery formats — oil tinctures, lipid capsules, alcohol extracts — had documented bioavailability problems in the published pharmacology literature, and his own experience matched what the papers described: variable, unpredictable, often sub-therapeutic at any reasonable dose.

Out of personal necessity, Joe began developing a process to make cannabinoids genuinely water-soluble. Cannabinoids are aggressively lipophilic by default; getting them into aqueous solution at meaningful concentrations is a non-trivial chemistry problem. He worked through it. The result is the proprietary water-dissolution method that today sits at the core of the Botanical Waters platform.

Important framing for what this story is and isn't. We do not claim the technology cures, treats, or prevents cancer or any other disease. The technology came from a journey through illness; it is not a claim about the disease itself. Joe's products are sold and marketed as wellness products, with the FDA disclaimer that applies to every dietary supplement and personal-care product on the U.S. market: these statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. The scientific story — better delivery vehicle for a lipophilic compound — is separate from any therapeutic claim about what those compounds then do in the body.

Joe built the OMGX line on top of that water-dissolution IP. The Hemp Botanical Water line you can buy today on /mushrooms/shop is the consumer-facing product of that work. The next line, Mushroom Botanical Water, applies the same approach to functional-mushroom triterpenes — that work is at the research stage today, and you can read the full bench- scale protocol at /mushrooms/research/extraction.

Joe's editorial standard is set by his own experience of the wellness industry: peer-reviewed citation behind every claim, no “treats this disease” language, doses you can verify against the published literature. Every product ships with a third-party COA mirrored on /mushrooms/labs. That standard sets the tone for the whole platform.

Mitch is a neurodivergent operator with a multi-decade arc in cannabis-extraction research and a present-day 90-acre property in Minnesota dedicated to scalable mushroom cultivation. His public technical history includes early-2010s contributions to the r/CannabisExtracts community — back when the home-extraction discipline was being figured out by an open community of operators running bench-scale work in their garages and publishing methods to each other. That community-research orientation is the same orientation Mitch brings to Botanical Waters today: methods are written down, protocols are reproducible, and the work happens in public where possible.

The 90-acre Minnesota property is the cultivation arm of the company (full description at /mushrooms/mission). Mixed hardwood + open acreage + outbuildings — a land profile that supports indoor fruiting rooms for fast-cycle gourmet species, outdoor log cultivation of shiitake/maitake using native hardwood, substrate composting at agricultural scale, and the long-term food-access allocation that anchors the operation's mission.

On the platform-engineering side, Mitch runs Reise Tools Studio — the engineering organization that builds the software the whole operation runs on. The site you're reading was written there. The catalog, cultivation curriculum, strain library, extraction research, and admin infrastructure are all platform-side outputs of the studio's work. The decision to build in public — to publish the strain database, the cultivation protocols, the bench SOP, the legal stance — is consistent with the open-research orientation Mitch carries from the earlier extraction-community era.

The neurodivergent angle matters here practically: Mitch's default mode is deep, focused systems work across long arcs — exactly the disposition that makes multi-year cultivation operations and multi-month research protocols viable. The platform's completeness — twelve+ data modules, six lanes, dozens of long-form articles, end-to-end commerce + admin in a short build window — is a product of that disposition.