Psychodelics, Plant medicine and functional chocolate with Funga Founder
The plant that opens your heart
Milana Traun left a comfortable European life, moved to Mexico City in a pandemic, and came back with a plan to introduce the UK to a South African succulent most people have never heard of. This is how Funga was built.
It started with a melted chocolate bar in a plastic bag on a small Indonesian island. Milana Traun was 22, travelling with a friend, and found herself in a lagoon so beautiful she still struggles to describe it — having ingested what she estimates was four or five grams of psilocybin mushrooms mixed with DMT.
"I always described this experience as a moment with God," she says. "The closest I've ever felt to God. It was a clear before and after in my life."
That afternoon — the clarity it brought about herself, what she wanted, who in her life was worth keeping — became the seed of everything that followed. Several years later, she moved to Mexico City in 2021, during the pandemic, and started building Funga: a platform for education around psychedelics and alternative healing, eventually a product line, and quietly, a growing referral network connecting people with mental health struggles to the right practitioners.
The gap she was trying to fill
Mexico gave Milana two years of immersion. She was in a country where mushrooms and alternative healing practices are woven into the culture at a level that felt completely foreign to her Austrian upbringing. She met healers, facilitators, mycologists, ceremony runners. She learned and wrote, every day.
What she couldn't find anywhere online was a place that brought all of this together in a way that was both aesthetically considered and genuinely accessible — not intimidating, not fringe, not clinical. That was the gap Funga was built to fill.
The platform (fungo online.com) exists. Events followed — Berlin, Milan, Madrid. Then came the product.
"I felt like there was a big gap in the conversation around mental health and alternative healing. And no place online where people could learn about these topics in a very aesthetic and easy-to-understand way."
What's actually in the chocolate
Fungo Chacos for Grooving is a small, carefully packaged chocolate — designed to sit on a coffee table or slip into a bag — and it contains two active ingredients that took months to source correctly.
Ingredient one: Cordyceps
A functional mushroom used in Chinese medicine for thousands of years. Milana is particular about quality: most cordyceps products on the market use mycelium grown on grain — not the fruiting body, which is where the potency lives. Hers come from one of the leading medicinal mushroom growers in the world. Cordyceps boost stamina, energy, and oxygen flow. They are also, she notes, an aphrodisiac.
Ingredient two: Kanna (Sceletium tortuosum)
A succulent from South Africa, used by indigenous communities including the Khoisan for thousands of years. Hunters took it before going out to suppress hunger and sharpen focus. It was used for pain relief in childbirth. It featured in trance dances and healing ceremonies.
Kanna binds to serotonin receptors in the brain — functioning like a gentle, plant-based SSRI. Some call it nature's antidepressant. Over time, it also regulates the amygdala, reducing reactivity to everyday stressors. Milana is the first person to put Kanna into chocolate form in the UK.
Note: Kanna should not be taken alongside antidepressants.
When to take it — and what it feels like
Milana takes it at 11am when she wants to get into flow. Before meditation or yoga. Around 6pm before going out — for the present, connected, bouncy feeling it gives without the next-day cost of alcohol.
She spent several months last year reformulating her relationship with alcohol, and Kanna was part of what made that possible. "No drug makes you feel as bad the next day as alcohol does. You take Kanna, you feel a little something, you feel relaxed — and then you wake up the next day at your hundred percent."
The intention matters to her. She doesn't want people to eat it mindlessly. "The sun is shining. I want to walk through Hyde Park. That would be a lovely moment to take it. How am I feeling? How would I like to feel?" That's the ritual she's designed around it.
"It's a friend, an ally, a teacher. It brings you more inside your body. It connects you more to yourself."
Coming next: Fungo Chacos for Dreaming
The second product is already in development. Milana sleeps nine to ten hours a night and takes her dream life seriously — every morning she records her dreams and asks an AI to analyse them through the lens of Carl Jung. The plant she wants to build the next chocolate around is Blue Lotus, from the Amazon, which she was introduced to two years ago by an herbalist. She describes the dream night that followed as unlike anything she'd experienced before.
"One third of our life we're asleep — and there's actually not that much information about what happens when we're sleeping and what our dream life means. I find it like a mirror."
The father test
When Milana told her father she was coming back from Mexico to build a platform around psychedelics for mental health, his first response was: "Milana, you're coming home today. My daughter is a drug dealer."
She asked for one condition before he shut it down: watch a documentary together. They watched Fantastic Fungi — available on Netflix — which covers the science and history of mushrooms and psilocybin, with researchers from NYU and Johns Hopkins. "He was like, okay — it's not only these crazy hippies. This is actually a serious thing." He gave her his blessing. It's still the thing she recommends to anyone whose family doesn't understand what she's doing.
Where the chocolate is going
Fungo Chacos for Grooving is currently stocked at Daylesford Organic in Notting Hill and the Cotswolds. Milana's vision for where it belongs goes further: behind a bar as an alternative to alcohol, at yoga studios, boutique hotels, music events. There's an unannounced collaboration coming — one she put on a "manifestation board" when she was first formulating the product.
She's also, less visibly, connecting people. A large part of what Funga does — invisible on the website and Instagram — is that Milana regularly receives messages from people struggling with mental health who want to be pointed toward the right support. She connects them to facilitators and retreat runners she trusts. One she mentions: Justin Townsend, head facilitator at Micro Meditations in Jamaica, which runs guided psilocybin retreats with therapists in one of the few places in the world where it's legally permitted.
"When I'm able to help someone find the right alternative care — that gives me so much motivation. I love to do that."
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Quick fire
Three things that bring joy: Routine. Kanna. Dancing.
Mantra: Trust the process.
Favourite film: True Romance.
Bucket list: Swim with whales.
Advice to younger self: Don't spend too much time worrying about how things will come about. Even the bad things lead somewhere good.
What's out right now: Social media.
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