Surfing News

Home

Quizzes

Newsletter

Koz Surfboards: “When Mycelium Meets the Ocean”

Originally posted on SURFER | By Owen James Burke | Last updated Apr 1, 2025 2:39 PM ET

The race to create a viable, high-performance surfboard using mycelium in place of a polystyrene-based foam started well over a decade ago, depending upon whom you ask. And while the industrial development and scaling of mycelium production for single-use packaging and receptacles is generally agreed to be what spurred the concept of a “mushroom-based” surfboard, any number of aspiring innovators have made their go at a solution.

Koz, a Brittany, France-based endeavor dreamt up by designer and graphic artist Thibault Fournel in 2017 in response to a newspaper article on the use of mycelium in packaging, is one of a number of innovative entities that might just be on the cusp of something.

Thibault dove headlong into the concept, presenting an outline for the project and winning two Initiatives Maritimes prizes, which led him to enroll in a composite training course. There, he crossed paths with Pierre Thomas, a former pastry chef studying ocean-racing sailboat design. There was synergy, and a partnership formed.

“We wanted to create surfboards that were entirely bio-sourced and eventually compostable, with the smallest possible environmental footprint, but with the ambition of remaining affordable for everyone,” say Fournel and Thomas.

The duo formed their first prototype in April of 2023 and that following October, launched Koz Surfboards in Carnac, a quaint coastal village in wave-rich Brittany with playful little peaks.

Fournel and Thomas have kept the prototypes coming, fine-tuning their process so that they can grow blanks, start to finish, within five days.

“The production process,” they write, “is simple enough to be complex: [We] collect rainwater, mix plant waste combined with mycelium in a mold, and after five days dry the board while collecting the water. Once dry, they cover the board with flax fiber and biosourced resin. [The] goal is to be ready for the challenge of a compostable board within three years, to have molds made from recycled plastic, and to have [the] dryer run on solar energy.”

They’re hopeful that, with such a tight and relatively closed-loop process, they’ll be able to offer a 6’9”, 42-liter mid length out of their own 4300-square-foot facility at around €300 (~$325 USD) and a 7’2”, 52-liter model in collaboration with local surf shop Makū in the €450 (~$490 USD) range, keeping the weight of both boards at or under about 7kg (15.5 pounds). Weight, it should go without saying, is going to be one of the biggest hang-ups for most with mycelium-core surfboards. It’s unlikely that heft will be reduced by Koz or anyone else anytime soon, but then it offers its own retrospective elegance to those who know how to harness it; See: Greg Noll, Mike Hynson, Robert August…the list goes on. And to that end, these boards might even be moderately lighter than 1960s- and ‘70s-vintage logs, foot for foot.

“We’ve validated a lot of things like the tooling, the recipe, and the production speed. We’re now tackling fabric sampling [for a fiberglass cloth alternative] to have the most solid and efficient board possible,” Fournel recently told me.

Koz is planning to launch a crowdfunding campaign in the United States toward the end of April.

Quotes within this story are translated from French to English.

This article first appeared on SURFER and was syndicated with permission.

More must-reads: