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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

3D Food Printing

Welcome to Sushi Singularity. Did You Have a Reservation and Submit Your Biosample?

Just offering 3D printed sushi would be enough for a restaurant to land a story in The Spoon. But Sushi Singularity, a restaurant opening in Tokyo later this year, is taking the concept one step further by requesting you kindly submit a biosample from which they will 3D print a personalized meal created specifically for you.

Oh man, 3D printing and personalized nutrition? That’s like catnip for us.

My Modern Met reports that the Sushi Singularity restaurant is from Open Meals. You might recall that Open Meals made headlines a couple years back by teleporting sushi, which the company called “the world’s first food data transmission.”

Now Open Meals is looking for a different type of data: yours. When you make a reservation at Sushi Singularity, they mail you a home health kit to collect biosamples. According to Mashable Southeast Asia, “You’ll have to send them samples of your DNA, urine, and other bodily fluids first. They call this your ‘Health ID’.”

Okaaay… That’s a little, personal, but whatevs! You’ll be dining in the future, and how else are you supposed to get a completely personalized meal?

At the restaurant, you’ll be treated to beautiful 3D-printed dishes built bit by bit into sushi such as Cell Cultured Tuna, Powdered Sintered Uni, and Negative Stiffness Honeycomb Octopus. Aside from the eye-popping design of each piece of sushi, it will be crafted specifically for your health profile (though exactly what that means remains unclear).

Video via Open Meals

As noted, Sushi Singularity sits firmly at the nexus of two trends we follow closely at The Spoon: 3D printing and personalized nutrition.

It’s actually been a busy year for 3D food printing. Redefine Meat announced high-volume 3D printing for plant-based steaks. Legendary Vish is 3D printing plant-based salmon. And SavorEat has developed a technology that 3D prints and cooks plant-based meats.

As 3D printing evolves, it promises to open up new levels of bespoke food creation tailored to your specific dietary and health needs. For example, a company called Nourish is using 3D printing to create personalized vitamin supplements. As raw ingredient materials advance and resolution improves on the machines, even greater levels of specificity with meals and personalization will be unlocked.

Neither the Sushi Singularity website or coverage of the restaurant mentions prices, though if you have to ask, as the saying goes, you probably won’t be able to afford it. If that winds up being the case, don’t take it personally.

Isreali Startup MeaTech Prints Carpaccio-like Meat

Israeli bioprinting startup MeaTech 3D announced earlier this week that it successfully printed a carpaccio-like layer of meat, CTech reported. The thin, uniform layer of muscle tissue lays a foundation for the holy grail of alternative proteins: lab grown steak.

Founded in 2018, MeaTech integrated tissue engineering and 3D printing technologies to produce animal-free cuts of beef. Stem cells are taken from the umbilical cord— so no animal is harmed in the sampling process—and multiplied in a bioreactor. The stem cells are then differentiated into the needed cell types, like muscle and fat cells. These distinct cells become the cellular inks used by the 3D printer, which prints a complex structure of fat and muscle cells that can grow into an actual cut of meat. 

“3D printed tissues are at the cutting edge of cell-based meat technology,” Kate Krueger, a cell biologist and alternative proteins consultant for Helikon Consulting told me this week in an email interview. 

MeaTech’s most recent initiative, named Project Carpaccio because of the products similarity to the thinly sliced Italian meat. The printed single layer of tissue proved the team could successfully sort muscle and fat stem cells, produce the necessary cellular ink and combine the meat and fat cells in a way that causes them to coalesce into a single structure. 

MeaTech is one of a few companies exclusively aiming to produce whole muscle tissue. The majority of cultured meat to date has been ground or minced, made by manually combining lab grown cells into a sludge that can be turned into a burger, nugget or patty. While both types of cultured meat are necessary to disrupt the meat industry, growing muscle tissue is decidedly more difficult. Tissue engineers have to mimic the intricate systems that support muscle growth in an animal. 

“It’s easier to make minced meat and we understand that – but we’re not going there. We believe the real solution will come from growing large, industrial-size chunks of meat,” CEO Sharon Fima told the Jerusalem Post earlier this year.

Project Carpaccio shows proof of concept and a lot of progress in two years. But MeaTech’s 3D printed steaks have a long road ahead. Regulatory approval, affordability and scalability are still major hurdles that could take up to a decade to overcome, Fima told Haaretz in March. Their competitors, however, believe they’ll be on plates and burgers within the year.  Fellow Isreali startup, Redefine, announced in June that their printed steak will be in restaurants by the end of 2020 and in supermarkets by 2022. And SavorEats plans to test out their plant-based burgers, which are 3D printed and cooked simultaneously, in a leading fast food chain within the next twelve months.  

With Project Carpaccio finished ahead of schedule, MeaTech is on to the next challenge, printing a quarter pound (100 gram) steak. They will print the steak’s foundational structure, grow it so size in an incubator and see if it passes the taste test. 

Legendary Vish Creates Plant-based Salmon through 3D Bioprinting

To create a more sustainable seafood option, three Ph.D. students decided to apply their experience in 3D bioprinting. The result is the Austrian startup Legendary Vish, which uses plant-based ingredients and 3D bioprinting to re-create a realistic salmon fillet.

I spoke to Robin Simsa, the CEO of Legendary Vish this week. He said a benefit to bioprinting salmon is that it offers an alternative to aquaculture and wild salmon. Fish that are raised in aquaculture farms are often fed antibiotics and are at risk for contaminating wild fish with parasites/pathogens, and wild salmon can contain microplastics and heavy metals. Additionally, salmon is susceptible to overfishing since it is a popular seafood and often touted as a “health food.” Legendary Vish’s 3D printed plant-based salmon fillet is free of these toxins and contaminants, and void of potential environmental concerns.

The plant-based salmon fillet looks shockingly real, with a convincing red-orange color and white stripes of fat. When asked if the salmon fillet truly tasted like salmon, he said the flavor and aroma are very accurate. However, they are working on developing an improved “mouth feel” for the product, in hopes of making it a firmer texture. The salmon will contain nutrients and health benefits similar to real salmon, like protein and Omega-3 fatty acids.

Legendary Vish’s salmon is a unique seafood alternative because it is crafted from mushroom protein and algae. Other companies re-creating fish like Shiok, BlueNalu, and Wild Type use cell-based technology to create seafood alternatives. In the world of 3D printing, Redefine Meat and Novameat create plant-based beef and pork alternatives. 

Legendary Vish has not yet received outside capital, but is currently speaking with investors. The company’s goal is to release their bioprinted salmon to the European market by 2022, first focusing on Scandinavian countries, and then turning to larger cities within Europe. Next year, they may begin testing the salmon in certain markets on a small scale.

3D Meat Printing Startup SavorEat Lands $3 Million in Funding

Israel-based SavorEat, a company which has developed a proprietary technology that simultaneously print and cooks plant-based meat substitutes, has landed a $3 million funding round. The funding round was led by investors Mor and Meitav Dash.

The funding round, which was first reported by Israel-based news publication Globes, is the second for SavorEats in the last two weeks. Prior to this investment, the company had raised $1.75 million from Millennium Food-Tech.

The investment comes as interest in 3D printed meat alternatives heats up, especially in Israel. Other startups competing in this nascent market include Redefine Meat (formerly Jet Eat) and Meatech, a company which prints cultured meat cells into steak.

SavorEat’s technology is unique in a couple of ways. The first differentiator is that is uses a plant-based cellulose as a binder. The cellulose is combined with other ingredients such as plant-based fats and protein to make the final product.

Another thing that sets SavorEat apart is that it prints fully cooked pieces of meat.

From my piece on SavorEat earlier this month:

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.”

According to SavorEat CEO Racheli Vizman, the company has signed a partnership with one of the largest fast-food chains in Israel, BBB Group (Burgus Burger Bar), and they plan on testing the product out in the restaurant chain in the next twelve months. From there, the company hopes to use the recent funding round to commercialize and expand using the their recent funding.

KFC Bringing Beyond Meat Plant-Based Chicken to SoCal, 3D Printed Chicken to Russia

KFC announced a partnership with Beyond Meat today to bring plant-based chicken sandwiches to 50 KFC locations across Southern California. Starting on July 20, the Beyond Meat Chicken will be available for a limited time in select KFCs in Los Angeles, Orange County and San Diego.

This is the latest in a string of tests KFC has rolled out for the Beyond Chicken. The restaurant chain made it first available in Atlanta, GA last year, followed by tests in Charlotte, NC and Nashville, TN, as well as a one-day promotion in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada. In Atlanta, the Beyond Chicken sparked long lines of customers who waited at least an hour to try the plant-based nuggets.

Today’s announcement continues the relationship between Beyond Meat and KFC parent company, Yum Brands. In addition to the previous market tests, this past June Yum China announced that Beyond’s burgers would be available at select KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell stores in mainland China for a limited time as well.

The timing of KFC’s move into California is actually coming at a good time. Sales of plant-based meat, which have been growing over the past few years, have surged even higher during the pandemic, as COVID-19 highlighted limitations of our meat supply and shone a light on the working conditions of meat packers.

But plant-based chicken wasn’t the only alternative protein news to come out of KFC today. Over in Moscow, KFC Russia announced that it was “launching the development of innovative 3D bioprinting technology to create chicken meat in cooperation with the 3D Bioprinting Solutions research laboratory.” In other words, KFC is looking to develop lab-created chicken nuggets. The company says it will receive a final product for testing this fall.

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.