Foam Cores and Thermoforming: Rewriting What a Pickleball Paddle Can Do

Walk into any pickleball shop right now and you'll notice something: the honeycomb-core paddle that dominated the sport for years is quietly disappearing from the "best of" lists. In its place is a new generation of paddles built around solid foam cores and fused together in a single mold under heat and pressure. It's the biggest construction shift the sport has seen, and it's worth understanding both the engineering behind it and why it's generating so much conversation.

From Honeycomb to Foam: How We Got Here

For most of pickleball's modern history, paddle cores were built from a polymer honeycomb — a lightweight grid of hexagonal cells sandwiched between two face sheets. It worked well, but it had a ceiling: honeycomb cores compress unevenly, wear out around the edges, and can develop dead spots over time.

That started to change when a wave of "full foam" paddles hit the market. According to The Dink Pickleball's coverage of the full-foam shift, the CRBN TruFoam Genesis, followed closely by Selkirk Labs' Project 008 and Diadem's Blue Core, are widely credited as the paddles that kicked off the trend — collectively referred to as "Gen 4" paddles. Instead of an air-filled honeycomb grid, these paddles are built from foam that fills the entire core, edge to edge. The Dink's reporting notes that the shift has been dramatic enough that polypropylene honeycomb cores had all but disappeared from the top of competitive paddle rankings by 2025.

Interestingly, not every major brand jumped in immediately. JOOLA — maker of Ben Johns' signature Perseus line — notably held off on a foam core even as competitors raced to release one. As Pickleheads' review of the JOOLA Pro V explains, JOOLA instead doubled down on its own "Propulsion Core" and a proprietary "Tech Flex Power" layer, betting that its existing formula could still compete with the new foam builds. That divergence is part of what's making the current paddle market so interesting to watch — the top brands don't agree on which core material actually wins.

EPP vs. MPP: Not All Foam Is the Same

Once you start comparing foam paddles, you'll run into two acronyms constantly: EPP and MPP. The Dink Pickleball's breakdown of paddle anatomy is one of the clearest explanations available, and PickleballHQ's guide adds useful side-by-side detail.

EPP (Expanded Polypropylene) is made by fusing small pre-expanded foam beads together. It's lightweight and springy, compressing and rebounding quickly on contact. Players describe the feel as softer and more forgiving — it dampens vibration and makes touch shots and resets easier to control.

MPP (Modified Polypropylene) is chemically related to EPP but manufactured differently: instead of fusing pre-existing beads, gas is injected directly into molten polypropylene, producing a denser, more rigid foam. The result is a crisper, "poppier" response off the paddle face, with more energy returned to the ball — which is why MPP shows up more often in paddles marketed for power and pace.

Neither is strictly "better." As The Pickleball Globe's EPP vs. MPP paddle comparison points out, it comes down to playstyle: control and touch players tend to gravitate toward EPP, while drive-and-attack players lean MPP.

What Thermoforming Actually Does

Foam core and thermoforming get talked about almost interchangeably, but they're technically two different things — one is a core material, the other is a manufacturing process — and it's worth separating them clearly. Helios Pickleball's construction guide and JustPaddles' explainer both lay out the process well: rather than gluing separate layers — face sheet, core, edge guard — together after the fact, the entire paddle is assembled in a single mold and fused as one piece using heat, pressure, and epoxy resin. Many paddles today also seal carbon fiber around the full edge in the same process, which adds strength and extends the paddle's life.

The performance payoff is a stiffer, more structurally unified paddle. Because there's no separate glue layer absorbing or dispersing energy at the seams, thermoformed paddles transfer force to the ball more efficiently — which is a big reason the power paddle category is now almost entirely thermoformed.

Where it gets genuinely nuanced is that foam core and thermoformed construction aren't opposites — a paddle can be both. As one detailed comparison from Daisy Dink points out, most premium 2026 paddles combine a foam-injected core with a thermoformed, single-mold build. The real performance differences come down to the face material, paddle thickness, swing weight, and shape — the core alone doesn't tell the whole story.

Power vs. Spin: What the Data Actually Shows

There's a common assumption that foam means more power and thermoforming means more spin, but the reviewers who've actually tested paddles side by side complicate that story. Pickleball.com's foam core explainer notes that foam builds can pop just as hard on drives as thermoformed paddles while staying noticeably softer on touch shots — a combination that used to require trade-offs. On spin, foam's extra "dwell time" (the ball sitting on the face slightly longer before releasing) gives a textured surface more time to grip the ball, but textured carbon and Kevlar faces on traditional honeycomb cores still hold their own in spin testing. In short: the face material matters as much as the core, and broad claims about "foam paddles spin more" or "thermoformed paddles hit harder" don't hold up cleanly once you control for other variables.

Watch It Explained

If you'd rather see the technology broken down on video than read about it, two are worth watching:

The Bottom Line

Foam cores and thermoforming aren't a single trend — they're two separate manufacturing shifts that happened to arrive at the same time, and together they've redefined what a "top-tier" paddle looks like in 2026. The practical upshot for a player shopping for a paddle: don't just look for the word "foam" or "thermoformed" on the box. Ask what type of foam (EPP for touch, MPP for pop), whether it's genuinely single-mold thermoformed construction, and what the face material is — because increasingly, that combination matters more than any one buzzword.

Sources & Credits

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