Mycelium in the news: facades, coffins, packaging and protein from the same fungus as in your grow kit

Use the word mycelium a few years ago and you had to explain what it was. Now it appears in construction trade journals, in the funeral business and in the food industry, and hardly a month passes in the Netherlands without a news item about it. We read that news with mixed feelings: it concerns exactly the organism inside our grow kits, and it is presented as something entirely new. Here is a tour of the most striking items of the past year, with what a grower recognises in each.

A living facade from Heijmans

At Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven in autumn 2025, the construction company Heijmans showed the Growing Facade: a 3D-printed wall panel of living mycelium, developed with designers Eric Klarenbeek and Maartje Dros and linked to Dutch mushroom cultivation. The panel grows in a mould, is fire retardant, odourless, sound insulating, and can be returned entirely to nature at the end of its life. What the grower recognises: this is the plant pot from our earlier piece, printed and scaled up to facade size. The principle is the same: mycelium binds loose material into a whole and dries into a stable, light panel. What is new is the scale and the printer, not the fungus.

Coffins that feed the soil

Delft-based Loop Biotech has been making coffins from mycelium for a few years, and the story made the press again in early 2026: a coffin that decomposes in the ground and enriches the surrounding soil instead of burdening it. The coffin is grown in a mould and then dried, which makes it a large relative of every spent grow block crumbled into the garden. Anyone who has ever laid an exhausted block under a layer of wood chips and found dark, crumbly soil six months later has already applied the principle of this coffin.

Packaging instead of polystyrene

Dutch company Grown.bio makes packaging material from mycelium grown on agricultural residues, as an alternative to polystyrene. It is the application that is furthest along internationally: protective corners, boxes and insulation that grow for a week and are compostable afterwards. Again, the grower is not surprised. An oyster mushroom growing on straw or hemp does exactly the same thing in a bucket: a light, firm, coherent block. The difference from a grow kit is that the packaging industry dries the block before it makes mushrooms, and we do so afterwards.

Mycelium as protein on your plate

This year Wageningen University & Research published research by Jasper Zwinkels, who is completing a doctorate on fungal mycelium as a protein source in food. The conclusion in brief: mycelium alternatives to meat and fish deliver plenty of high-quality protein in Dutch meals with a lower environmental impact than many plant-based alternatives. Companies such as The Protein Brewery in Breda now produce such protein on an industrial scale. For anyone looking for the link to the kitchen table: a mushroom is compacted mycelium with a cap on top, and the protein Wageningen writes about is the same protein that came up in myth four of our myths piece. Only now it is grown in tanks rather than a block.

And the spawn world itself

Less visible but to us the most interesting: the Dutch branch of the American company Ecovative, which made spawn and substrate for the mycelium industry, has been taken over by the founders of Scelta Mushrooms from Venlo and continues as OurCelia. It means that the knowledge of making spawn, exactly what we do in miniature when we make plugs, is becoming an industry of its own in the Netherlands. Limburg was already the mushroom heart of Europe for button mushrooms; it is now becoming that for mycelium as a material too.

So what is genuinely new?

Not the fungus, and not the principle. What is new are the moulds, the printers, the tanks and the money. Investors are putting millions into mycelium, a Dutch trade publication wrote this year, and they do so because the organism can do three things few materials combine: it grows in a week, it binds waste into a product, and it decomposes at the end without a trace. We can add one thing that appears in no press release: it is also edible. And anyone who wants to know what it feels like to watch it grow does not need to build a facade. A pouch of spawn and a flowerpot will do.