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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

3D Food Printing

Sodexo to Deploy SavorEat’s Plant-Based Burger Printing Robot at the University of Denver

This week, food service giant Sodexo and plant-based 3D printing specialist SavorEat announced they will be rolling out SavorEat’s 3D printing robot at the University of Denver. The deployment of the SavorEat Robot Chef marks the first deployment of the Israel-based company’s 3D printing technology in the U.S.

SavorEat, which went public on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange in 2021, has been building its plant-based 3D printing technology for half a decade. The printer, which both prints and cooks plant-based burgers, was first rolled out in Israel last fall through a partnership with catering company Yarzin-Sella. The printer enables customers to customize their burger, choosing the size of the burger, doneness, protein level, and cooking style.

SavorEat, which initially pushed its product’s plant-based 3D printing angle, started focusing on promoting its burger printer as a robotic chef over the last year-plus with the launch of its second-generation platform. The company has published several blog posts hailing the benefits of automation in restaurants and says it plans to help restaurants reduce costs through back-of-house automation.

The partnership with Sodexo was inked back in 2021, and at the time, the two companies indicated they would deploy the plant-based meat printer in 2022. From the announcement:

Sodexo will examine the robot chef system and the first product developed by SavorEat, a plant-based protein burger, within higher education institutions across the U.S. In parallel, both parties are working on reaching an agreement for the distribution of SavorEat products.

In 2020, SavorEat CEO Racheli Vizman told The Spoon that their plans extend beyond food service and that the company would someday build a home-based 3D meat printer.

“That’s our goal,” said Vizman. “Where we can also have, next to a microwave, we can have machines that you know can create a variety of products.”

While you may need to wait a while for the home version of SavorEat’s Robot Chef, in the meantime, you can try out a SavorEat printed burger at the University of Denver’s Rebecca Chopp Grand Central Market in Community Commons starting this week.

Kroger Begins Testing Cake Printing Robot From Beehex at Location in Ohio

Late last month, grocery giant Kroger began to trial the use of a cake-printing robot made by Beehex in the Gahanna, Ohio, location, The Spoon has learned.

The new Cake Writer machine, which will allow consumers to input a custom message and watch as the cake is decorated in minutes on the spot, is made by 3D food printing startup Beehex. Depending on the message, the decoration process will take two to fourteen minutes. The machines will be loaded with hundreds of different pre-made designs and fonts for the customer to choose from.

Beehex CEO Anjan Contractor told The Spoon that the startup plans to install 10 Beehex Cake Writer machines in the Columbus market next year and has plans to install up to 350 machines in the future with Kroger.

Contractor says that a typical machine costs roughly $10 thousand when produced at scale, and the ongoing costs include $50 a month for cloud database management and about $5-6 for each 20 oz cartridge of frosting.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shorts/yNbBofgCp4s?feature=share

I don’t know about you, but I would gladly pay for a customized cake. We just celebrated a birthday in our family, and I had to buy a tube of frosting and scrawl the name on the top of the cake with my atrophied handwriting. A customized image with legible writing is something I’d pay for.

You can check out the Cake Writer in action below in the video provided by Beehex.

The ChefDoodler Could Finally Make Sugar-Based 3D Food Crafting Approachable

One of the first products to make 3D printing approachable was the 3Doodler. Unlike conventional 3D printers that required knowledge of digital design software and the operation of what were often finicky printing systems, the 3Doodler let folks draw in 3D space freehand.

This simplicity appealed to non-technical and creative types, making the product one of the most successful 3D printing projects ever on Kickstarter.

Fast forward a decade, and Wobbleworks, the company behind the original 3Doodler, is back at it. Only this time, instead of helping you make making figurines or art with melted plastic, they want you to draw something to eat with their newest product, the ChefDoodler.

The ChefDoodler, which looks like a combination between a frosting gun and a soldering iron, lets you draw with sugar to decorate baked goods, cookies, and candy or make stand-alone three-dimensional creations.

The sugar drawing pen uses a sugar substitute called isomalt, which comes in five colors: carrot, crystal, rose, grape, and forest. ChefDoodler users will get a bag of sugar capsules with the purchase of the sugar pen, and the company says they will sell refills for $14.99 or lower at retail (with additional savings for Kickstarter backers.). The ChefDoodler, which has raised over $21 thousand as of this writing, will retail for $99 ($59 on Kickstarter). The creators expect to ship to backers starting in October of this year.

3D food printing today mainly exists in high-end culinary kitchens, usually done by chefs creating desserts that are essentially works of art. My hunch is the ChefDoodler could have a similar impact to the original 3D drawing pen, helping to open up a craft to a new audience who doesn’t have access to the necessary tools or the technical know-how required to make fancy sculptures. The relatively low cost and ease of use of the pen also give it the potential to make basic sugar sculpting a new go-to for parents looking to keep kids busy on summer breaks or rainy weekends.

As always, we have to urge a note of caution for any Kickstarter product since it’s not out yet, and there are no guarantees backers will get something for their money. Still, given the success of the original 3Doodler and subsequent campaigns, chances are good backers will have their sugar drawing pen in their hands by the end of the year.

ChefDoodler - The Sugar Pen for Bakers

Cana, The Startup Building a Make-Any-Drink Beverage Printer, Shuts Down

Cana, the company which was building an appliance that they claimed could create and customize virtually any beverage, shut down last week, The Spoon has learned.

According to numerous Linkedin posts from previous employees, the company could not secure funding and laid off all of its employees last week. Cana, which had raised $30 million in January last year, promised to have the product ready to ship sometime this year. But despite having a working prototype and brand partners in place, Cana could not raise the “funding necessary to build a production line for manufacturing and shipping devices.”

The news comes just two months after the company brought on none other than Sir Patrick Stewart of Star Trek fame to be a brand ambassador, a hail mary move that didn’t work out.

Like many startups nowadays, Cana found the drastically reshaped funding environment just too difficult to survive. Consumer hardware startups have had a particularly tough time in recent years, and Cana’s climb was made even more difficult given the task of developing and building a consumables production infrastructure.

The Cana vision of a make-anything drink machine always seemed a bit too good to be true, so it’s a bummer we’ll never see if they could have made it work if they had gotten more funding.

Podcast: 3D Food Printing & Cooking with Lasers!

Close your eyes and imagine the kitchen of the future. Not 100 years into the future, more like 10 or 20.

Does that kitchen you’re envisioning include a 3D food printer whipping up a dinner or a snack? And if so, are those printed creations being cooked with lasers?

While the crazy idea might not happen tomorrow, if life follows the example of science fiction (as it often does), there’s a chance a 3D food printer with laser-powered cooking will be sitting on our kitchen counter in a decade or two.

If we’re going to get there, this week’s guest on The Spoon Podcast, Jonathan Blutinger, might have something to do with it. Jonathan is a 3D food and software-defined cooking researcher who is trying to envision what this future world of cooking looks like.

In the podcast, we talk about:

  • How Jonathan got started exploring future cooking technologies
  • What is laser cooking and how does it pair with 3D food printing
  • How the current state of the 3D food printing ecosystem compares to other industries like digital music
  • The difference between printing sweet vs savory products
  • Will consumers ever accept the idea of 3D printed food
  • And lots more!

You can listen to this week’s podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or by clicking play below.

The Spoon 2023 3D Printing Deep Dive

To hear what’s happening in the world of 3D food printing, The Spoon brought together some of the leading thinkers in the world of food printing for a conversation about the current state of this nascent market.

We discussed the current and future outlook for software-controlled printed food, beverage printing, meat printing technology, food printers for space travel & more!

Speakers:

  • Jonathan Blutinger – Coauthor, The future of software-controlled cooking

  • Anjan Contractor – CEO, BeeHex

  • Marine Coré Baillais – Founder, The Digital Patisserie

  • Giuseppe Scionti – CEO, NovaMeat

Thirsty For a Beer? Let’s Print You Up a Frothy Cold One

Say it’s Friday night, and you’re having friends over to have a beer and watch the game. You ask your buddy what type of beer she likes, and when she tells you she wants a hoppy IPA, you say no problem.

While you don’t have one in the fridge, within a few minutes you return from your kitchen and hand your friend a pint of freshly-made American-style IPA.

That’s the vision for a new startup out of Belgium called Bar.on, which claims to have created the world’s first molecular beer printer. The machine, which the company calls One Tap, can produce a variety of beer styles such as blond, brown, IPA, and tripel, as well as make high, low, or even no-alcohol beer.

Beer printing “cartridges” from Bar.on

The One Tap uses what the company calls “beer cartridges,” small vials of flavor compounds that can dial up or down a beer’s hoppiness, sweetness, fruitiness, and aroma. The machine, which can fit on a kitchen countertop, allows the user to adjust the parameters and have a beer ready to drink within a couple of minutes.

If the idea sounds similar to the Cana, it is, only unlike the Cana, the Bar.on system just makes beer. And unlike the long list of startups that have come (and mostly gone) focused on building home brewing appliances, the One Tap makes beer instantly, without the bother of going through the days (or even weeks) long process of brewing and fermenting up the sudsy stuff.

A big part of the Bar.on pitch is also similar to Cana’s in that it plays up the sustainability angle of avoiding shipping vast amounts of liquid and the elimination of beverage containers. It’s a smart pitch, though one that will likely resonate more with Europeans, who tend to be more mindful of the environmental impact of their consumption habits than Americans.

Of course, the big test is how the beer tastes. While I have my doubts about the machine making anything resembling a Pliny the Elder or Bodhizafa quality brew, Bar.on claims that their molecular beer recipes have performed well in blind taste tests.

And then there’s the slight weirdness around the idea of ‘printing’ a beer. Still, one strong argument in its favor is that the concept overcomes the most significant deterrent for home beer crafting, which is that it’s a messy process that takes a long time to make a consumable beverage. In this sense, the One Tap takes home beer making out of the realm of a dedicated hobby and brings it something closer to the convenience of a Sodastream or Keurig coffee maker.

The Bar.on team, which raised €.1.8 million last fall, has developed its home machine prototype and is also working on a professional machine for bars called the One Tap Pro, which it plans to put into field test later this year. The company says it is raising a Series A to scale up operations and the production of its system.

Cocuus Raises €2.5M to Scale Industrial 3D Food Printing for Plant & Cell-Based Meat Analogs

According to a release sent to The Spoon, 3D food printing startup Cocuus has raised €2.5 Million in a Pre-Series A funding round to scale up its proprietary 3D printing technology platform for plant-based and cell-cultured meat analogs. The round was led by Big Idea Ventures, with participation by Cargill Ventures, Eatable Adventures, and Tech Transfer UPV.

Founded in 2017, the Spanish startup has developed a toolbox of different 3D printing technologies under its Mimethica platform to enable the printing of different types of foods. These include Softmimic, a technology targeted at hospitals and eldercare facilities that transforms purees into dishes that look like real food (think of a vegetable or meat puree shaped into a “steak”), LEVELUP, an inkjet printing technology that prints images on drinks like coffee or beer (like Ripples), and LASERGLOW, a laser printer platform that engraves imagery onto food.

The Cocuus Team

But it’s the company’s bioprinting and scaffold-printing technologies which are driving interest from investors. Unlike some early 3D food printing systems targeted at creating meat analogs, the company claims it will utilize robotics for high-volume production of plant-based meats. The company utilizes mathematical modeling of meat products to develop analogs and combines automation with 3D printing technology to drive high-production output.

Cocuus is already taking in revenue through its inkjet and laserjet image-on-food printing technologies, and the new investment will allow it to invest in its bioprinting and scaffolding-based technologies. According to a pitch made by the company last year, Cocuus estimated its bioprinting tech would reach commercial deployment in 2022 and its scaffolding technology would be deployed in 2023.

While it’s unclear if those timelines have shifted, the combination of existing revenue-generating businesses combined with long-term developmental technologies targeted at high-growth markets shows why Big Idea Ventures and others saw promise in Cocuus.

The LuckyBot Turns Your Ordinary 3D Printer Into a Chocolate Printer

If there’s one type of food that excels when it comes to 3D food printing, it’s chocolate. Chocolate melts easily and works well with 3D printhead extruders, allowing you to build 3D figures layer by layer much as if you were using plastic or another material.

The problem is that purpose-built 3D chocolate and food printing machines are expensive. Food printers designed to extrude chocolate or other types of food will set you back anywhere from $1,500 to $6,000.

Which is why I find the LuckyBot intriguing. The extruder can be added to a number of different FDM 3D printers on the market to enable 3D food printing. Made by a company called Wiiboox, the LuckyBot replaces a 3D printer’s standard extruder with one designed specifically for printing food material.

You can watch a detailed review of the LuckyBot by Youtuber Printhouse here that discusses installation, operation, and challenges with the system.

Below is a video of the LuckyBot printing a piece of chocolate:

The LuckyBot first showed up on Kickstarter (and raised about ~$65 thousand) and is now available via the company’s website or Amazon for $159. However, before you rush out to buy one, I’d suggest you watch the installation video and realize the LuckyBot doesn’t exactly look user-friendly. As someone who’s played around with low-cost 3D printers with poorly written instructions, I can attest to how frustrating the whole process can be. Adding a new printhead is probably doubly so.

That said, if you’ve been itching to become a CAD-powered chocolatier and don’t have $4 thousand to drop on a Foodini, you might want to give the LuckyBot a try.

Cana Unveils Molecular Beverage Printer, a ‘Netflix for Drinks’ That Can Make Nearly Any Type of Beverage

In late 2018, food tech entrepreneur and investor Dave Friedberg got together with a few scientists for dinner and drinks and talked about a recent article he had come across. The article detailed a research study that suggested most any beverage is made up almost entirely of water, with only about one percent or so making up a drink’s unique flavor.

It wasn’t long before someone wondered aloud if it would be possible to create a machine that could synthesize nearly any drink.

“Why not just make the Star Trek Replicator and let people print any drink they want, when they want, right in their own home?”

That night the concept for the Cana, a ‘molecular drink printer’, was born.

The device, which one investor describes as a “Netflix for drinks”, uses a single cartridge filled with flavor compounds that Friedberg claims can make a nearly infinite number of drinks: “We know we can print an infinite number of beverages from a few core flavor compounds. We know we can do this across many existing beverage categories — juice, soda, hard seltzer, cocktails, wine, tea, coffee, and beer. Consumer taste testing panels score our printed beverages at the same or better taste levels as commercially available alternatives. Our hardware designs will print beverages quickly and accurately. Our pricing and the footprint of our hardware can yield significant savings and advantages for most households..”

The system is about the size of a toaster and utilizes what the company describes as novel microfluidic liquid dispense technology that combines Cana’s individual flavoring ingredients in a small form factor.

The company was incubated within Friedberg’s Production Board, his investment holding company for ag and food tech businesses. The Production Board has spent $30 million building Cana’s proprietary hardware platform and chemistry system.

In Friedberg’s blog post about Cana, he talks about how this new appliance is part of a larger trend towards decentralized manufacturing.

“Making a molecular beverage printer meant inventing a new kind of supply chain. Provided that the printers can use materials mostly sourced locally (i.e. tap water), we can replace old industrial supply chains with ones that are more nimble and more redundant, moving production to the point of consumption — the home. This new decentralized supply chain would use less energy and less carbon and cost less to operate, sourcing and shipping only the flavor compounds that make up the 1% of each beverage, rather than all the water and packaging.

This great decentralization in food is something I wrote about in 2019, when I talked about how intelligence in food production systems had begun to move towards the edge: In food retail, IT, robotics and digital powered micromanufacturing start to make its way to the different storefronts. In the restaurant space, we’re beginning to see automation and robotics to create hamburgers at the quality a Michelin star chef would make them, only without the chef. And at home, we’re witnessing the emergence of digital technologies used to grow food and prepare food and beverages beyond the capability of the home cook.

Friedberg and the Cana team have smartly positioned their system as a way to create beverages without all the plastic waste, claiming that the machine can print enough drinks to save a family from throwing about a hundred containers a month into the recycle or trash bin.

From here, the company plans to move the Cana into full production. While they aren’t yet releasing pricing, Cana says their machine and the ingredients will be more affordable than buying the drinks in containers. The company says they will have more information on pricing and the initial design in the coming months.

Stay tuned…

Image Credit: Cana Technology

Early Research Shows Promise for Cooking with Lasers

Ever since I first saw secretly evil superhero Homelander cut through anything and everyone with laser beam eyes, I’ve thought it’d sure be handy to have a pair of laser peepers to clean up weeds around the house or cook a quick meal.

While I (unfortunately ) won’t be able to shoot lasers from my eyes anytime soon, things are looking up in the laser cooking department thanks to a recent research project by a group of students a Columbia University. In a recent article for npj Science of Food program for Nature, the group describes the project in which they print and cook raw 3D printed chicken using lasers.

The group started by pureeing a chicken breast and then extruded the chicken paste into squares using a 3D printer. From there, they used different lasers to conduct various trials that varied parameters with three different lasers: A 5–10 W blue diode laser (445 nm) as primary heating source, and comparative tests done with an Near Infrared (NIR) laser (980 nm), NIR laser (10.6 μm).

From the explainer video:

“By tuning parameters such as circle diameter, circle density, path length, randomness, and laser speed, you can optimize the distribution of energy that hits the surface of the food, but at higher resolution than conventional heating methods.”

The group also experimented cooking in highly-precise cooking patterns (including a checkerboard pattern) to see how it compared with traditional cooking. The takeaway? Laser cooking might make better food than traditional cooking methods like broiling.

“Compared to oven broiling, we found that laser cooked foods are more moist and shrink less after heating,” concluded the group.

Interestingly, the group also found that lasers can cook food wrapped in plastic. The idea of being to cook through packaging opens up potential new avenues for offering consumers no-contact food in foodservice scenarios, something that’s no doubt of interest in these pandemic-stricken times.

While some like SavorEat are building print-and-cook systems, this is the first time I’ve seen a cooking system which uses lasers. The high-fidelity control of laser cooking is reminiscent of the solid-state cooking systems slowly making their way to market, only instead of using radio waves they shoot highly directed beams of light.

You can read the full research paper here and watch the explainer video below:

Robots that Cook: precision cooking with multiwavelength lasers

Redefine Meat Launches 5 “New Meat” Plant-Based Proteins in Israel

Plant-based meat company Redefine Meat announced five new products are now available at select Israeli restaurants and hotels. The “New-Meat” line consists of Redefine Burger, Redefine Ground Beef, Redefine Lamb Kabob, Redefine Sausage, and Redefine Cigar (a classic Middle East dish that wraps meat in pastry).

As we’ve covered before:

Redefine Meat uses 3D-printing technology along with ingredients it calls “Alt-Fat,” “Alt-Muscle,” and “Alt-Blood” to create whole cuts of plant-based meat that mimic animal-based meat. The company has also mapped out 70 sensorial parameters that let it control factors such as texture, juiciness, fat distribution and mouthfeel.

It should be noted that the products Redefine announced today are not whole cuts, but rather ground versions of meat. This is a pretty standard way for plant-based meat companies to enter the market because replicating the structure of animal meat with plants is way more difficult than creating a minced product.

And like Impossible Foods, Redefine Meat is first going to restaurants with its new plant-based meats. It’s “New-Meats” are available at: Hudson, Nam, Asif Center, Eddi’s Hideout, The Lounge, Sinta Bar, C2, Guesta, Joz & DanieBudega, and American Kitchen.

Redefine plans to expand New-Meat availability to Europe in Q4 of this year followed by U.S. and Asian expansion in 2022.

The entire plant-based meat space is getting more sophisticated and moving beyond burgers (pardon the pun). Juicy Marbles introduced its (expensive) plant-based filet mignon in March of this year. In January of this year NovaMeat, which also uses 3D printing technology to create meat analogues, received €250,000 (~ $307,500 USD at the time) from the Spanish government and announced a collaboration with Disfrutar, a two-Michelin star restaurant. Other players in the 3D-printed plant-based meat space include fellow Israeli companies MeaTech and SavorEats (both of which are publicly traded on the Israeli stock exchange).

At the beginning of this year, Redefine Meat announced a partnership with Israeli meat distributor Best Meister and followed that with a $29 million Series A round of funding. The company plans to debut its whole cuts of plant-based meat at the end of this year, following pilot tests.