RYZE Mushroom Coffee: NAD Investigation, Lead Settlement, and 859 BBB Complaints

RYZE is the best-selling mushroom coffee brand in the United States. It is also the most regulated, the most sued, and the most complained-about. In the last 18 months, RYZE has been the subject of a National Advertising Division investigation that forced it to drop five health claims, a Proposition 65 settlement over lead in its products, an active class action over deceptive subscription enrollment, and 859 BBB complaints from customers describing the same handful of dark patterns over and over again.

None of this is hidden. Every fact in this article links to a public regulatory filing, court docket, settlement document, or BBB complaint record. We pulled it together because RYZE's marketing implies a brand built on science and transparency, and the public record tells a different story. If you are about to buy a $36 bag of RYZE, you should know what is in it, what the company has been caught doing, and what better-vetted alternatives exist.

1. The NAD investigation: every health claim withdrawn

On September 11, 2025, BBB National Programs' National Advertising Division — the self-regulatory body that polices ad claims for the U.S. advertising industry — announced the results of Case #7492 against RYZE Superfoods. The case was unusual in that NAD itself initiated the investigation through its routine market monitoring, not through a competitor challenge.

NAD challenged five express claims RYZE was making for its Mushroom Coffee:

• "all-day energy"
• "sharper focus"
• "healthier digestion"
• "better immune support"
• "better sleep"

And one implied claim for its Mushroom Matcha — that the matcha provides "appetite-suppressing benefits comparable to GLP-1 agonist medications, but without associated side effects." In plain English: RYZE was marketing its matcha as a natural alternative to Ozempic.

RYZE's response was telling. The company voluntarily discontinued every single challenged claim before NAD could complete a merits review. Under NAD policy, voluntarily discontinued claims are treated "for compliance purposes, as though NAD recommended they be discontinued." RYZE pulled the claims rather than attempt to substantiate them.

Asa Waldstein of the Supplement Advisory Group, commenting on the case: "Companies should ensure ingredient data is from competent and reliable scientific evidence study and match the amount in product. This NAD action shows that companies should think twice about making unsubstantiated claims in any form of marketing. Staying away from drug-like actions such as GLP-1 agonist is a good first step to being compliant."

Read NAD's published decision and RYZE's response carefully and the implication is unavoidable: RYZE could not produce competent scientific evidence to back any of the five claims that were the entire pitch for its mushroom coffee. So they dropped them.

2. The Prop 65 lead settlement: $20,500 and a warning page

On August 22, 2024, Environmental Health Advocates, Inc. served RYZE with a 60-Day Notice of Violation under California's Proposition 65, alleging that RYZE Mushroom Overnight Oats contained lead and consumers were not given the warnings California law requires.

The settlement, filed with the California Department of Justice, has RYZE paying $20,500 to the claimant and its counsel and agreeing not to sell any product in California that exposes a person to more than 0.5 micrograms of lead per serving per day without a Prop 65 warning. That 0.5 microgram figure is California's safe-harbor level — the legal cliff above which warnings become mandatory. RYZE settled at exactly that line.

RYZE now hosts a Prop 65 page on its website acknowledging that some ingredients "may contain naturally occurring lead" and that "chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer or reproductive harm may be present." That page exists because of the 2024 settlement.

Mushrooms are bioaccumulators — they pull heavy metals out of the soil and substrate they grow on, and concentrate them in their tissue. This is well-known to mushroom industry chemists. Brands that take it seriously publish full Certificates of Analysis showing lead, cadmium, arsenic, and mercury levels for every batch. RYZE does not publish a single Certificate of Analysis. Asked for one, the company has not produced one.

For context: Real Mushrooms and Nammex publish per-batch heavy metals testing for every product they ship. Four Sigmatic — which has its own lead history we cover separately — at least claims to test, even if it does not publish results. RYZE provides nothing. The most you get is the post-settlement disclaimer page.

3. 859 BBB complaints in three years

Pull up RYZE's profile on the Better Business Bureau and you find an A+ rating. Read further and you find 859 complaints filed in the last three years — 248 of them in the most recent twelve months alone. That works out to roughly one complaint every single day, every day, for three years.

BBB ratings are based on whether a business responds to complaints, not on complaint volume or customer satisfaction. RYZE responds. That's how you get an A+ next to 859 complaints. The complaints are the real story, and they cluster around four patterns:

Pattern 1: Subscriptions customers never agreed to

The most common complaint pattern is involuntary subscription enrollment. A customer selects what they believe is a one-time purchase, completes checkout, and is then billed for a recurring monthly shipment they never authorized.

From a January 2026 BBB complaint: a customer made a one-time $27 guest purchase (no account created), and one month later was charged $36 for a shipment she did not order. From a March 2025 complaint by Karla Lynn Becker: charged $66 for an unauthorized second shipment while she was out of the country. From a June 2024 complaint by Abel Sanchez: believed he had canceled on May 16, was charged $36 on June 10 anyway. From a ComplaintsBoard user: "I ordered 1 bag of hot chocolate just to try the product and they ended up making it a subscription that I did not ask for or approve."

Pattern 2: No cancel button

Multiple complaints describe RYZE's website as having no cancellation mechanism at all. From a BBB complaint: "The word 'cancel' is nowhere on the RYZE website even with search functions. The only option is to 'skip' individual future shipments rather than canceling the service entirely."

Skip and pause are not the same as cancel. A skipped shipment becomes the next shipment after the skip window. A paused subscription resumes. Customers who want to leave RYZE entirely report having to email a specific address (alex@ryzesuperfoods.com) or call a phone number — and getting AI-driven customer support that resists honoring the request.

Pattern 3: Tiny print at checkout

Several complaints allege that the subscription option at checkout is designed to be the default or to be hard to avoid. From a complaint: "The subscription option's writing is made tiny and hard to find on the website, with no selection box — just tiny lettering under the product name." From another: "After checkout, the company auto-selected recurring orders, and customers had to go back and manually cancel subscriptions."

Pattern 4: "You must have chosen this"

When customers contact RYZE about charges they did not authorize, complaints describe customer service responses that engage in what BBB complainants call "victim-blaming" — claiming the customer must have chosen the subscription themselves. The 30-day money-back guarantee is offered, but it only applies to the first subscription order, not the unauthorized recurring ones.

4. The class action: Younger v. Ryze Inc.

On November 9, 2023, Jessica Younger filed a class action lawsuit against RYZE Inc. in Los Angeles County Superior Court. The case was removed to the Central District of California in February 2024 (case number 2:2024cv00868) and remains open and pending as of April 2026. No settlement has been announced.

The complaint alleges that RYZE operates an "unlawful and deceptive 'automatic renewal' scheme" and violates three California statutes: the Automatic Renewal Law (Bus. & Prof. Code §17600 et seq.), the Consumer Legal Remedies Act, and the Unfair Competition Law. The specific allegation is that "without consumer knowledge or consent, RYZE enrolls its customers into an automatically renewing 30-day autoshipment that results in ongoing charges on consumer credit card, debit card, or third-party payment account unless and until the consumer cancels."

California's Automatic Renewal Law requires subscription businesses to present auto-renewal terms in a "clear and conspicuous" manner before purchase, obtain the consumer's "affirmative consent," provide an acknowledgment that includes cancellation terms, and provide "a cost-effective, timely, and easy-to-use mechanism for cancellation." The Younger complaint alleges RYZE violates all four requirements. The 859 BBB complaints describing the same patterns are the public-facing version of the same allegations.

5. The math problem: ~333mg per mushroom

RYZE's Mushroom Coffee contains a "Super6 Mushroom Blend" — 2,000mg total, six mushroom species. The individual amounts are not disclosed. RYZE hides them behind a proprietary blend label, citing "competitive reasons."

Do the math. 2,000mg divided across six species is roughly 333mg per mushroom per serving — assuming an even split. Some mushrooms might get more, others less, but the total budget is fixed. No single mushroom can reach a clinical dose without leaving the others severely underdosed.

Now compare to the doses used in the human studies that justify mushroom coffee's existence as a category:

• Lion's Mane: 1,000-3,000mg/day in cognitive studies. Docherty et al. (2023) used 1,800mg/day in a double-blind RCT. RYZE delivers ~333mg per cup. That is one-third of the minimum studied dose, and that is only true if RYZE allocated the entire 333mg of its 2,000mg budget to lion's mane.
• Cordyceps: 1,500mg/day in the lowest published dose, up to 4,500mg in exercise studies. RYZE delivers ~333mg. That is 22% of the minimum.
• Reishi: 1,400-5,400mg/day in published studies. WebMD's clinical dosing reference uses 1,400mg as the floor. RYZE delivers ~333mg. That is 24% of the minimum.
• Turkey Tail: 1,000mg/day for the most common extract preparations. RYZE delivers ~333mg. That is 33% of the minimum.
• Shiitake: 5,000-10,000mg/day in the immunity study Dai et al. (2015) used. RYZE delivers ~333mg. That is 7% of the minimum — one-fifteenth.
• King Trumpet: not enough human data to set a clinical dose floor.

The picture this paints is consistent across all six mushrooms: RYZE's per-mushroom dosage is a small fraction of what published clinical research uses. It is also consistent with the NAD outcome: RYZE could not substantiate its health claims because the doses are not high enough to have measurable effects.

Innerbody, in its independent review of RYZE, reached the same conclusion: RYZE's overall mushroom quantity is "likely not enough to bring about the positive effects the RYZE team claims."

6. Are they still making the dropped claims?

The most uncomfortable part of the RYZE story is what came after September 2025, when the NAD ruling forced RYZE to permanently discontinue its health claims. Cached pages, third-party reviews, and current product pages all show RYZE continuing to make claims that look functionally identical to the ones it dropped:

• "calm, jitter-free energy" without crashes
• "All-day energy & focus, no jitters or crash"
• "Boosts your mood, relieves stress and supports peaceful sleep"
• "You'll get jitter-free energy that boosts gut health, immunity, and your mood"
• "Increases oxygenation to sustain energy and support rapid recovery"
• "Supports calm, but laser sharp focus and boosts overall brain health"

Compare to the claims NAD forced RYZE to drop: "all-day energy, sharper focus, healthier digestion, better immune support, better sleep." The substance is the same. The wording is slightly different. RYZE told NAD it was "modifying the presentation of its advertising claims" — and what that appears to mean is rephrasing the same claims rather than removing them.

If the substance has not changed, the NAD ruling was effectively meaningless. The 484,000 followers on RYZE's Instagram account see the same functional pitch they always saw, and the influencer ecosystem RYZE pays makes claims that mirror exactly what NAD ordered taken down.

So what should you actually drink?

If you want a mushroom coffee that you can verify is what its label says, the criteria are not exotic. Ask three questions:

1. Does the brand publish a Certificate of Analysis showing beta-glucan content and heavy metals testing? Beta-glucans are the bioactive compound in functional mushrooms. A real fruiting-body extract tests at 25-35% beta-glucan; mycelium-on-grain products test at 1-7% beta-glucan and 35-40% alpha-glucan (rice starch). The number is the difference between mushrooms and rice flour.
2. Does the brand disclose individual mushroom amounts, or is everything hidden behind a "proprietary blend"? Proprietary blends almost always hide underdosing. MUD\WTR discloses 562mg per mushroom. Real Mushrooms publishes per-batch percentages. RYZE shows you nothing.
3. Does the brand make health claims that name specific outcomes ("better sleep," "sharper focus") without linking to the human study and dose that supports them? If yes, walk away. The NAD environment in 2026 is tightening; brands willing to back their claims with evidence are the only ones worth your money.

Real Mushrooms is ConsumerLab's "Best Mushroom Supplement Company" and publishes COAs on request within 24 hours. Four Sigmatic uses fruiting-body extracts and is generally a stronger product than RYZE, though we are not blind to its own 2018 Prop 65 lead notice and the 2024 lead-positive testing by Lead Safe Mama. MUD\WTR uses mycelium-on-grain (which has its own quality concerns we cover separately) but at least discloses what is in the bag and how much.

What you should not do is keep paying $36 a month to a brand that the National Advertising Division forced to retract its entire health pitch, that settled a lead lawsuit, that has 859 BBB complaints, and that is currently in federal court defending its checkout flow.

Note on this article

This is a news-investigative piece. Every fact in it is sourced to a public document — a regulatory filing, a court docket, a BBB record, a peer-reviewed study, or a published lab result. We are happy to share any source on request. RYZE was given the opportunity to respond before publication and did not provide a comment. If RYZE's situation changes — if the class action settles, if new claims are added or substantiated, if the company starts publishing Certificates of Analysis — we will update this article and date the change.

We also disclose: Evident is the editorial sister of Sleep Karma, a bamboo silk mouth tape brand. We do not sell mushroom coffee. We have no commercial conflict in this category. We wrote this because the public record on RYZE is unusually one-sided and the average consumer has no easy way to find it.