Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

3D Food Printing

SavorEat Plans to Build an Appliance For The Home That Prints & Cooks Meat

“That’s our goal,” said Vizman when I caught up with her via a zoom call. “Where we can also have, next to a microwave, we can have machines that you know can create variety of products.”

But to get there, first her company is working on building a product that can print and cook food instantly for a large quick service food chains, starting with one of the biggest in Israel, BBB (Burgus Burger Bar).

“We are about to start this testing it in their facility within a year, while we believe that we will be commercialize it in a larger scale two years from closing the financial round that we are now running.”

That financial round Vizman is looking to close is a $3.5 million seed round led by a company called Next Food, an Israel based food tech investment fund. Next Food led SavorEat’s pre-seed round of $1.75 million.

3D printed meat has gained momentum over the past couple years, especially, it seems, in Israel. SavorEat joins two other venture funded Israel based 3D meat printing startups in Redefine Meat (formerly Jet Eat) and Meatech, a company which prints cultured meat cells into steak.

Two things set SavorEat’s technology apart from those and other 3D meat printing startups. The first is the company’s binder, which is a proprietary plant-based cellulose. The cellulose is combined with other ingredients such as plant-based fats and protein to make the final product.

“We’re using the cellulose to bind a variety of fats and proteins and other tastes and flavors and combine a very stable emulsion,” said Vizman.

The other big differentiator for SavorEat’s technology is that it prints and cooks simultaneously, which allows the company’s printers to make a fully cooked piece of 3D printed meat like you might see produced by a futuristic appliance like that in the TV show Upload.

The food comes out “ready to be eaten,” said Vizman. “We’re printing one layer, then we cook one layer, print one layer, cook one layer. So at the end, you get something that’s ready to be consumed.”

This print and cook technology, according to Vizman, will give the cook a high degree of precision of over the final print.

“The nice thing about that is that you can also control the way you cook it. You can decide whether you want it medium, you want in rare, well done. How you want to cook it in the you want to grill it from the inside and rare from the outside.”

The company’s technology was invented by Oded Shoseyov, a serial inventor and entrepreneur who spends much of his time spinning out new ideas from his research lab at Hebrew University. Shoseyov is SavorEat’s chief science officer. Shoseyov and Vizman are joined by other executives from companies like Stratasys (3D printing) and IFF/Frutarom (flavors).

The full interview with Vizman, where we go in depth on the company and its technology, can be read below if you are a Spoon Plus subscriber. Find more information here about subscribing to Spoon Plus. 

Redefine Meat Announces High Volume 3D Printing For Plant-Based Steaks

Redefine Meat announced today it has achieved the ability to produce its 3D printed, plant-based steaks using high-production industrial-level 3D printing capabilities.

This new capability, which the company says allows them to now print up to 50 steaks an hour, will help company roll out its 3D printed steaks to select restaurants in Europe this fall for market tests as it prepares for a broader rollout of its industrial 3D meat printers to meat distributors in 2021.

Redefine’s plant-based steak is printed from three different ingredient packs which company calls ‘Alt-Fat’, ‘Alt-Muscle’ and ‘Alt-Blood.’ According to the company, they have mapped out 70 sensorial parameters that allow its printers to control texture, juiciness, fat distribution and mouthfeel.

“By using separate formulations for muscle, fat and blood, we can focus on each individual aspect of creating the perfect Alt-Steak product,” said company CEO Eshchar Ben-Shitrit in a release. “This is unique to our 3D printing technology and lets us achieve unprecedented control of what happens inside the matrix of alt-meat.”

When we spoke to Redefine last fall, at the time the company said printers cost up $100,000, but I’m guessing prices will come down slightly as they scale manufacturing of the hardware.

And while 50-steaks-per-hour production volume is certainly higher than early prototypes we’ve seen for plant-based meat production, it’s not quite industrial animal meat processing volume. As a result, the company’s printed steaks are currently only priced for higher end restaurants.

I’m hoping as the volume of production goes up and printer prices eventually drop, the price for the end user will come down enough for the company’s steak products to be sold outside of high-end restaurants at retail.

As part of the announcement, the company also announced a new partner in global flavor conglomerate Givaudan, who worked closely with the company in mapping the flavor components of the company’s Alt-Steak formulation.

Melissa Snover of Nourished on How 3D Printing is the Key to Personalized Food (Spoon Plus)

Since Nourished lies at the intersection of two burgeoning food tech trends — personalization and 3D printing — I reached out to Snover to learn more about Nourished. In our interview she clued me in on how they settled on 3D printing (fun fact: she actually invented the first ever 3D food printer!), why she’s not rushing to link up with DNA analysis, and sets the scene for a futuristic vision where your health is managed autonomously by wearables and home 3D printers.

It was a super cool conversation that gives real insight into where we’re at right now, both in the 3D printing and personalization spheres. You can read the full transcript of my conversation with Snover, complete with synced audio. I also excerpted some of the most noteworthy parts of our conversation below. 

This Spoon Plus Deep Dive conversation is available only to Spoon Plus subscribers. Purchase a Spoon Plus membership to get access to this exclusive content and much more.

 

BeeHex Launches DecoPod, a Cake Decorating Robot For Grocery Store Bakeries

In May 2019, Beehex expanded beyond its 3D pizza printing roots with the launch of a dessert decorating robot.

A year later, the company looks to be hitting its pastry printing stride with the release of a second product targeted at cake and cookie printing called the DecoPod.

Unlike the company’s first cake printer that was built for high-volume bakeries, the DecoPod is designed for in-store usage at your local grocery store. And, unlike the more professional cake printer, the DecoPod has a touch screen kiosk where customers can select a design and personalize the message that’s printed on the top of the cake.

You can watch the DecoPod in action below:

According to Beehex CEO Anjan Contractor, the DecoPod can finish printing a cake in around 1-2 minutes. He says that this is fast enough for a typical in-store bakery to print up to 600 cakes per week.

Like many parents, I’ve bought my share of customized birthday cakes over the years at the grocery store or Costco and have often had to wait around for someone in the bakery to put a custom message on it. If I had the option of picking up a cake and printing a customized design and special message using an in-store printing robot, I’d jump at the chance, even if I had to pay a little extra.

For Beehex, which had rose to prominence making pizza printers for NASA, it seems like they’ve picked a more earthbound and – at least for now – higher volume business for its second act. Pastry printing is really the only 3D food printing market doing any volume at this point, in part because sugar is the perfect printing medium.

3D Food Printing Hasn’t Really Taken Off – This 3D Printing Exec Turned Pastry Chef Hopes to Change That

3D printing has taken off in countless industries and professions. Food isn’t one of them.

Not that people haven’t tried. There’s been a number of startups and a big company or two working on 3D food printing in recent years, but for the most part the technology’s been adopted by a fairly small handful of culinary adventurers.

One French 3D printing executive thinks food printing’s lack of success is due to those trying to convert their ideas into printed food with general purpose 3D model printing software (software for converting a 3D model to the printer is called ‘slicer’ or ‘slicing software’). This, Marine Coré Baillais says, leads to suboptimal results.

Baillais, the founder of a French 3D food printing consultancy called The Digital Patisserie (La Pâtisserie Numérique), told me that the reason general purpose 3D printing software doesn’t work well is it’s designed to print with materials like plastic filament, not food paste. This usually leads to less than optimal results because a food paste has unique characteristics that make it much different than filament.

“Paste is a viscous material and when you extrude it with a syringe, you need to consider pressure that changes during the 3D printing,” said Baillais. Baillais also said that viscous materials like paste are also difficult to retract during printing, which can lead to defects in the print.

This led the former deputy CEO of French 3D printing services company Sculpteo to think about creating her own software which would allow her to print with things like paste and create a continuous printing path.

“The idea came to me when I started to 3D print food myself, I adapted a syringe on one of my FDM (note: FDM stands for ‘fused deposition modeling’, a 3D printing process) printers,” said Baillais. “I took the software I normally used and it was not working.”

So she got to work on developing software. Her company partnered with the University of Technology at Troyes, France last year and set out to create software that would create specific G-Code (the control language used to communicate with the 3D printer) for a paste-based 3D printer that would relay the nozzle size, layer height, print speed and compensation for the first layer.

The team has gotten far enough to start printing with 3D food printers and they created a video of the software printing (what else) a replica of the south-facing rosace of the Notre-Dame.

slicer software for 3D printed cake

I asked Baillais why she decided to tackle 3D food printing after working at a big 3D printing services startup focused on enterprise applications. She told me it was in part due the frustration that had built up over the past decade at the relative lack of interest from the food industry in using 3D printing. She also has passion for making food, particularly French pastries, so much so that she went to culinary school and got trained as a pastry chef.

With her new pastry chef diploma in hand, she went to work at the age of 44 in the restaurant of the historic Le Meurice hotel. It was at Le Meurice where she also learned why many chefs don’t like working with machines and why the current 3D food printing technology isn’t satisfactory for them.

And so it’s this combo of 3D printing expertise and high-end culinary training that led Baillais and her company to their current state, a working version of their software in just a year. The team is currently working on finding more testers and potential partners to use her software.

Eventually she hopes to commercialize the software either as a stand-alone software application or a plug-in to generic software. She has hopes that by making 3D food printing easier with better software, it will lead to greater adoption of 3D food printing.

“At Sculpteo, we were always building applications with our clients, so they can get the best of this technology that I love,” said Baillais. “I hope that we’ll do the same for the chefs with this new company.”

This Swiss Company Can Now 3D Print Tons of Personalized Chocolate

It’s February 14, which means there’s a good chance you’ll give or receive chocolate at some point today. The chances that that chocolate will be 3D printed? Slim to nil.

But all that could soon change thanks to Barry Callebaut AG, a company that makes roughly one-fourth of all the world’s chocolate, including that used by well-known brands like Hershey’s and Nestlé. According to a press release from the Swiss corporation, it will work with gourmet clients to let them print personalized chocolate designs en masse through Mona Lisa, its chocolate decoration brand. In short — Barry Callebaut will help brands print customized chocolate creations.

Business partners can develop their own custom designs and specify size parameters for their chocolate. They’ll then share those with Barry Callebaut, which will print the custom chocolates in large quantities at its Mona Lisa 3D Studio. Barry Callebaut can print thousands of a particular design succession thanks to its new 3D printing tech, which keeps melted chocolate at the perfect temperature for speedy printing.

Chocoholics will have to wait a while before they can buy these 3D printed creations in stores, though. Barry Callebaut will first work with high-end clients, like hotels, pastry chefs and coffee chains. Its first customer will be Dutch hotel chain Van der Valk. Down the road, Barry Callebaut will open up its tech to use with manufacturers such as Nestlé and Hershey.

For aspiring chocolatiers who don’t want to wait, there are some home options. Mycusini is a countertop chocolate printer (though it’s only available in Europe). The Mayku Formbox lets you print DIY chocolate molds at home. And while it’s not available yet, but the Cocoterra lets you make bean-to-bar chocolate right in your kitchen.

Barry Callebaut’s tech is perfectly situated to tap into a trend we at the Spoon have been seeing everywhere lately: personalization. The chocolate-maker can’t produce individualized chocolates for every person, obviously — the Mona Lisa 3D Studio will be printing chocolates on a large scale. But with this new 3D printing service, businesses can get more creative with their sugary marketing and branding efforts. For example, Starbucks could make a line of hot chocolate sticks (it’s a thing!) in the shape of their signature coffee cups. Or your favorite hotel line could make pillow chocolates shaped like pillows!

As consumer demand for personalization grows, CPG companies are hustling to figure out how to tap into the trend — even when manufacturing in massive quantities. In fact, that’s one of the questions we’ll be tackling at Customize, our food personalization summit happening in NYC on February 27th! If you want to come, use code SPOON15 to grab 15 percent off your tickets.

Researchers Upcycle McDonald’s Waste Oil into 3D Printing Resin

We know that french fries aren’t good for you, but perhaps some good may come from our addiction to them. Researchers at the University of Toronto Scarborough recently showed that they could turn waste oil from McDonald’s deep fryers into a high-resolution, biodegradable 3D printing resin (h/t Plastics News).

Professor Andre Simpson led the research after realizing that the molecules in commercial resins were similar to the fats in cooking Oils. Last month, the University of Toronto Scarborough explained the research, writing:

Simpson and his team used a straightforward one-step chemical process in the lab, using about one litre of used cooking oil to make 420ml of resin. The resin was able to print a plastic butterfly that showed features down to 100 micrometres, and was structurally and thermally stable, meaning it wouldn’t crumble or melt above room temperature.

While the research is still early, Simpson points out how this technology could help on a couple of different environmentally friendly fronts. It helps find a use for waste oil, which can cause sewage backups and be expensive for restaurants to dispose of. Current 3D printing plastic resin uses fossil fuel oils and is difficult to make. Because the McResin is made from recyclable materials, it could be much cheaper than the current plastic version.

This McResin is also easily biodegradable because it’s basically just fats. Though Simpson doesn’t point to this specifically, perhaps this resin could create single-use cutlery or takeout packaging. There are obviously thermal issues to be worked out, but we are just at the beginning of this particular slice of 3D printing McResearch, and it will undoubtedly improve as more resources are poured into it.

Simpsons research joins a host of other startups tackling our plastic waste problem. Startups are developing ways to break our addiction to traditional plastic by developing edible cutlery, banana leaf packaging, or creating new types of compostable plastic-like packaging.

What’s cool about this resin is how it uses our addiction to greasy food to potentially help combat our addiction to single-use plastic. So maybe you can feel a little less guilty about ordering that side of fries next time.

NovaMeat Unveils Version 2.0 of its 3D-Printed Meatless Steak

NovaMeat, the Spanish startup which creates realistic meat alternatives through 3D printing plant proteins, has developed a new version of its faux steak. CEO Giuseppe Scionti told me that its new product, which he called Steak 2.0, is “the first to mimic simultaneously the texture and the appearance of an animal whole muscle cut, in this case a beef steak.” The steak cost €1.35 ($1.50) per 50 grams to produce.

Scionti claims this is the most realistic plant-based steak that has yet been developed. Steak and other whole muscle cuts — like chicken breast or pork chops — have a tricky texture that’s much more difficult to make from plants than, say, ground meat. And unlike burgers, there are very few plant-based steak options out there right now, outside of a few smaller brands mainly selling in Europe.

Down the road, however, that will likely change. Redefine Meat is also using 3D printing to make realistic meat alternatives, Atlast Food is developing a mycelium (mushroom root) based scaffold for whole cuts of plant-based meat, and Emergy Foods is creating plant-based steak that looks eerily similar to the real thing — but neither of them have brought a product to market yet. On the cell-based front, Aleph Farms has already successfully grown cultured steak the width and thickness of a credit card (though that’s also a ways from being available).

NovaMeat’s Steak 2.0 has yet to be put to a public taste test, so it’s hard to substantiate Scionti’s claims regarding its superior taste and texture. It’ll be a while yet before we’re able to taste it ourselves. The startup will license its micro-extrusion technology to plant-based meat manufacturers in two to three years. However, Scionti told me that he hopes to start selling his steaks at a small scale to restaurants in Europe by the end of 2020.

By that time, there will likely be a lot more players making plant-based whole muscle cuts that actually look and taste like the real thing. Most notable is Impossible Foods, maker of the plant-based “bleeding” burger. The startup is set to unveil a brand new product at CES 2020 tomorrow, and last year Impossible’s CEO Pat Brown told The Spoon that their next product would likely be steak. Check back tomorrow to see if NovaMeat’s Steak 2.0 is about to get some serious competition!

Mycusini, the First Consumer-Priced 3D Chocolate Printer, Begins Shipping in Europe

While the future of 3D food printing will include everything from printed bread to plant-based steaks, the reality is printing globs of goo for your meal might not be an appetizing thought for most consumers.

But what if it were chocolate?

If you live in my home, where pretty much everyone is a certified chocoholic, there’s a good chance you’d find some takers. Luckily for us, a consumer-priced 3D chocolate printer went from idea to reality recently when the mycusini home 3D chocolate printer started shipping in Europe.

Priced at €298 (~$320), the mycusini is the only chocolate printer on the market today shipping below the $2,000 price point. The product debuted on Kickstarter in June and went on to raise €20,000 (~$22,185 USD). Originally, mycusini was scheduled to ship by the holidays, but the product is weeks ahead of schedule and, according company spokesperson Gerd Funk, regular orders for the Kickstarter were all fulfilled at the end of last month.

Part of the reason Print2Taste, the company behind the mycusini, has been able to get the price so low is that they first developed a professional 3D chocolate printer, the Procusini, in 2015. Since that time, the company has continued to iterate and improve on the Procusini (currently in its fourth generation), including the development of the “choco” ingredient capsules that are similar to the ones used in the mycusini.

As I wrote this past June:

“So how does the mycusini work? Basically like all 3D food printers: by extruding small amounts of material (chocolate in this case) layer by layer. The major downside to the mycusini is it, at least initially, requires the use of custom-made “Choco refills” as the printing material, which are essentially crayon-shaped chocolate cylinders that fit into a stainless steel dispensing cartridge. A single-source supplier is never ideal, and being reliant on a small startup out of Germany for chocolate refills likely means potentially long wait times before you can start printing your next confection.”

While I still would prefer not to rely on a proprietary refill system, I think it would be worth the investment for those who are attracted to the idea of creating elaborate chocolate designs. Because of its low price, I could see the mycusini as a low-risk way for some chefs or chocolatiers to dip their toe into the 3D food printing waters.

So what would you print with the mycusini? The software allows you to freehand draw designs or pick from a pre-designed template, of which there are over 200 designs created by Print2Taste’s in-house chef. According to the company, in the future mycusini users will be able to upload their own designs created through CAD software and shared on an online marketplace.

Like I said, I could see some takers in my home for a product like the mycusini, but because the product is only shipping in Europe, I’ll have to wait before I put it on my holiday wish list.

For those of you living in Europe, the mycusini might make a good last-minute holiday gift for the chocolate nut or aspiring chocolatier in your life, especially since the product looks be on sale through the holidays at €250.

It’s Personal: Nourished 3D Prints Vitamins Tailored Exactly to Your Needs

If you’re like me, when shopping for vitamins you might pick up whatever’s on sale. After all, vitamins are mostly one-size-fits-all, right?

British startup Nourished would very much disagree. The Birmingham, U.K.-based company is trying to shake up the supplement space by using 3D printing technology to create personalized vitamins made specifically for you.

First you answer a short questionnaire on the Nourished website describing your lifestyle, health issues and nutrition goals. Nourished’s algorithm then builds you a unique “stack” out of their 28 “nourishments.” (You can also build your own stack if you already know what ingredients you want.) The company then 3D prints bespoke, layered vitamins just for you out of vegan gel — which end up looking like rainbow gummy candy — and deliver to your door every month.

Why 3D print the vitamins? According to Nourished’s Head of Brand, Caitlin Stanley, manufacturing supplements via 3D printing opens up a whole new world of personalization possibilities. Typically, active ingredients that show up in vitamins — like ashwagandha and Vitamin A — interfere with each other when combined into the same capsule. However, by printing these ingredients on top of each other, Nourished can fuse them into the same bite-sized supplement.

Each Nourished box comes with 28 stacks meant to be taken once a day. The vitamins are individually packaged “to maintain efficacy,” according to Stanley, who added that the packaging is compostable.

Photo: Nourished

If there’s one thing that might put people off of Nourished, it’s the price. The service costs £39.99 (~ $51.00) a month, which is significantly more than your average vitamin bottle off the pharmacy shelf. However, the cost is on par with other personalized D2C vitamin services, like Care/Of.

When I asked about competitors, Stanley was adamant that Nourished is the only company out there right now creating a truly personalized supplement. Care/Of basically just aggregates a variety of pills into a single pouch, while Nourished actually combines all of the ingredients into a bespoke bite-size supplement made specifically for the individual.

Nourished just launched a little over six weeks ago, so it’s in the very early stages. Right now it’s only shipping in the U.K. However, Stanley told me that the company plans to head to the U.S. in 2020. The company has raised a seed round for an undisclosed amount and currently has a team of twenty-five.

Personalization is a hot trend in the food space right now. Consumers want all aspects of their diet tailored to their exact preferences, from recipes to drive-thru orders to the foam topping your craft cocktail. But when it comes to health and nutrition, customization should be “first and foremost,” said Stanley. We’ll see if Nourished’s 3D printing strategy can help them be first and foremost in the personalized vitamin space, too.

If you’re interested in what’s coming next in personalized nutrition, you’ve got to be at Customize. The one-day event in New York City will explore the world of food personalization throughout the meal journey. Grab your Early Bird ticket before they’re all sold out!

Aleph Farms Says it Has Grown Meat Cells in Space

Israeli lab-grown food company Aleph Farms on Monday claimed a world’s, or rather, a galaxy’s first, announcing that it has successfully grown small-scale muscle tissue on the International Space Station, which the company points out is “248 miles away from any natural resources.”

Aleph Farms says it uses the natural process of muscle-tissue regeneration in a lab setting to grow its steaks. The Sept. 26 experiment was conducted in the Russian segment of the ISS, using a 3D bioprinter developed by Russia’s 3D Bioprinting Solutions. The U.S.’s Meal Source Technologies and Finless Foods also collaborated on the experiment.

Russian cosmonaut Oleg Skripochka conducting the experiment on the ISS. (Courtesy Aleph Farms)

Not only does the experiment prove that astronauts may one day grow their own steaks, the company says, but it shows that Aleph’s technology could be used anywhere on Earth, despite access to water and other resources. Growing cows for slaughter is one of the most resource-heavy food production processes for the planet, which is why many startups are seeking to replace beef, whether through cultivated or plant-based meat.

“In space, we don’t have 10,000 or 15,000 liters of water available to produce one kilogram of beef,” Didier Toubia, co-founder and CEO of Aleph Farms, said in the press release. “This joint experiment marks a significant first step toward achieving our vision to ensure food security for generations to come, while preserving our natural resources.”

While Aleph had Earth’s climate crisis in mind when conducting this experiment, 30 Japanese companies launched a consortium this year to figure out how to feed people in space. But hopefully, all of the solutions currently in the works will mean we won’t have to flee to another planet for survival.

Anrich3D Wants to 3D Print Food Personalized Just For You

The concept of 3D printing food is already pretty futuristic. Add in nutrition personalization, and you get something that sounds even more like it’s straight out of Star Trek.

That’s exactly the device that Anrich3D, one of the finalists in our SKS 2019 Startup Showcase, is trying to make. The soon-to-be-incorporated company is developing a system of 3D printers which can precisely dispense food based off of an individual’s particular nutritional and aesthetic preferences. Pretty radical, huh?

We spoke with Anrich3D founder and CEO Anirudh Agarwal about why he thinks 3D printing could make food more nutritious, affordable, and accessible. Check out the Q&A then get your tickets to SKS to see Anirudh pitch live in Seattle this October!

Give us your 15-second elevator pitch.
We produce personalized meal plans for health enthusiasts based on information from health trackers, apps, wearables and medical check-ups. Each meal is personalized to the individual using multi-material food 3D printing at scale.

What inspired you to start your company?
Most people don’t know what to eat. There are many apps and services out there to give you very personalized advice. But there are no services to convert those apps into meals. Moreover, humans are good at and enjoy creativity, while number crunching is a machine’s forte. I may want to decide what physical form of food I am in the mood for or even what cuisine, but I don’t want to measure every ingredient according to my nutritional requirements.

A food 3D printer can provide personalized nutrition integrating data from all the apps, wearables and even medical records that exist to create the mathematically optimized meal for me — inarguably, the best possible thing I could be eating. It is said, “It’s 80% nutrition and 20% exercise.” With this, I never have to worry about my 80%!

What’s more, it can produce little bite-sized pieces I call “foodlets” so as to make every bite perfect and an absolutely effortless experience. The peak of convenience beyond what any fast food restaurant can provide. And when machines make it, with scale, it can be available and affordable for all.

With “fast-food” made healthy, we can liberate people to always have a healthy option no matter how busy or broke. There is a saying in Hindi, “Jaan hai to Jahan hai”: if you have your health, you have the world! Health is the foundation of our productivity. With optimal nutrition and therefore good health within grasp, people can reach their full potential and propel humanity forward. And of course lower instances of diabetes, obesity and other lifestyle diseases. A lower strain on the healthcare system. Preventive healthcare!

It doesn’t end there. With enough scale, we can transform the supply chain for food by applying manufacturing inventory management techniques. We can work with grocery stores to minimize inventory and even utilize the fresh produce left at the end of each day to minimize food waste. With more efficient distribution, we may be able to reduce world hunger if not eliminate it completely!

I could go on about specific ground-level applications, but this is the overarching vision. This drives me and gives me a reason to wake up in the morning!

What’s the most challenging part of getting a food tech startup off the ground?
Where do I begin! Food is a touchy subject. Literally — we need to be careful about what is literally touching the food! We need regulatory approval (FDA for the U.S.) for the parts, the machine and the process of preparing the food. We also need food handling certification for all personnel that handle the food.

Food is also “touchy” figuratively. People have deep emotional connections to their food. A new form of food may have a psychological barrier to cross for acceptance. We need to focus on demonstrations and education and make this “new” thing mundane and “normal” with exposure for the majority to adopt it. The good thing is, instead of giving supplements powders, we want to focus on real food ingredients and just give the precise proportions of those!

How will your company change the day-to-day life of consumers and the food space as a whole?
Food 3D printing at scale has the potential to make “fast” food healthy. In other words, make healthy food convenient and affordable!

No two people are the same. Everyone has different needs and goals. Food 3D printing at scale has the potential to make individual-level personalization available and affordable for all. Beyond personalized nutrition, people crave a personal touch. For some people, a sandwich is most convenient, while it may be a wrap or hot pocket for others. Some want a dish displayed traditionally, while others may like their toast carved as a dinosaur. With 3D printing, this personal touch can also be added.

Armed with personalized nutrition and this personal touch, Anrich3D can change the perception of food and what form it can take! Star Trek anyone?

For kids, healthier food can be delivered in the shapes of their favorite characters to improve their motivation to finish the meal. This can be made into a gamified nutritional educational program for kids where they unlock more characters by finishing each meal. As the levels progress, they need to identify ingredients and make estimates for the amounts of each ingredient in a balanced meal. The program gradually helps them acquire the taste for healthier foods and teaches them about healthy ingredients and nutrition along the way!

This can be a government-mandated nutrition course in every school all over the world to raise a generation of healthier kids with an acquired taste for healthier food and a deep understanding of nutrition to create a healthier and more productive tomorrow!

Even beyond all that, Anrich3D can streamline the food supply chain from farm to grocery store to your plate so as to minimize waste and redistribute existing produce to minimize hunger. Mobilizing forces across countries, we can end world hunger!

Come watch Anirudh pitch live and at the SKS Startup Showcase next month! Get 25% off your tickets here.