Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

3d food

Elo Health Partners With Nourished For Launch of 3D Printed Gummy Supplements

This week, Elo Health, a personalized nutrition startup, announced they have partnered with UK-based Nourished to offer Elo customers an option to take their personalized supplements in gummy form.

The new partnership, which will allow Elo customers to replace up to 7 pills with a single 3D-printed gummy as part of a daily supplement regimen, is the result of a year and a half of collaboration between the two companies, according to Elo Health CEO Ari Tulla.

“We’ve been trying to find and build a better product for delivering the nutrients to people,” Tulla said in an interview with The Spoon. “Nourished has developed this unbelievably good modality of 3D printed gummy vitamins, and we’ve been working with them to formulate the ideal formulation based on the Elo Health AI.”

According to Tulla, while some of Elo’s customers are perfectly okay with taking multiple pills with a daily regimen, some would prefer a different delivery method for their supplements.

“Now they can take the equivalent of seven pills in one gummy,” said Tulla. “Seven layers equals seven pills. And we’ve worked with Nourished to dose them appropriately, so they actually have the same outcomes as the pills.”

Another new option to the Elo Health platform is the company is now allowing its customers to build their initial personalized supplement profile with a questionnaire instead of a blood panel. Initially, Elo required a finger prick blood sample to get a panel determining cholesterol, lipid, vitamin D levels, and more than a dozen other biomarkers. Understandably, some customers didn’t like the expense (up to $150 per test) or the discomfort of a blood test.

Tulla says the company’s AI model has optimized its platform so customers get similar outcomes with personalized supplements without an initial or ongoing blood testing.

“We have taken the learning from the last two and a half years and thousands of people who went through the funnel. And we’ve been optimizing the questionnaire to get very close to the same way we can get with a panel.”

For those who want to continue to use blood testing for an initial panel and on an ongoing basis, Elo will continue to offer them.

For Nourished, the Elo partnership continues the company’s momentum over the past year. This summer, the company announced they were entering Japan at Smart Kitchen Summit Japan, and they are also in the market in the northeastern US, the UK, and Europe.

In the future, Tulla sees his company’s AI-powered personalized coaching and nutrition counseling.

“When you have a question about nutrition, you want to get the response right then and there. And that’s what the AI can provide. It can provide a dialogue that happens right then.”

You can listen to my full conversation with Ari in the latest episode of The Spoon Podcast. If you’d like to hear from Ari in person, join us next week at the Food AI Summit.

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.”

3D Food Printing Startup BeeHex Debuts a Cake Decorating Robot

BeeHex, a company that got its start as a NASA project to create a 3D pizza printer, has gone from pizza to pastries with its latest product, a dessert decorating robot.

The new product, a high-volume machine that “prints” frosting from up to six 62 oz cartridges, uses an object scanning system to calculate the height and shape of items it will decorate. From there, the robot extrudes frosting to decorate the pastry with up to six colors. Depending on the complexity of the design, the robot can finish 15-21 cakes (1/4 sheet) per hour or 120-500 cookies. According to the company, this translates to an increase in productivity up to 66% over traditional (read human) cake and cookie decorators.

The base price for the 3D Decorator is $65 thousand and can be leased for $1,600 per month. While that might seem a bit spendy for a frosting-dispensing robot, it could easily make economic sense for a business with a whole lotta cakes to decorate that is paying a human to do all the work.

And of course, the best proof of whether a customer will pay a certain price is, well, customers, and BeeHex already has those. BeeHex CEO Anjan Contractor told me via email that the product is already shipping and they already have customers in markets ranging from “retail grocers to commissary bakeries.”

BeeHex’s transition from pizza to pastries should not be too surprising since pizza printing, while a neat proof of concept that allowed the company to develop their food printing technology, was never really all that commercially practical. The reality is pizza-making is something that can be done more quickly with human hands since throwing sauce and toppings onto a pie isn’t something that requires the precision of, say, decorating a cake.

That said, the company did raise a $1 million seed round from a pizza chain founder by the name of Jim Grote in 2017. Would the founder of Donatos Pizza be happy with the transition to cookies and cakes? My guess is yes, since at the time of the funding the pizza mogul was already talking up possible applications for BeeHex’s technology beyond pizza:

“After pizza, this technology could be used for a wide range of foods,” Grote told Techcrunch at the time. “The company has mastered the technology around dough, which is a real challenge. So it would make sense to expand into other baked goods, potentially.”

And possibly even personalized nutrition. While the company’s latest product is all about pastry decorating, according to Contractor, the food printing startup is already working on a new project with the US military.

“We also have an active project with the US Army to produce personalized nutrition bars for soldiers using the same hardware platform,” said Contractor.

If you want to see the BeeHex 3D Decorator in action, you can see it next month at the IDDBA (International Dairy Deli Bakery Association) Show in Orlando. Or, alternatively, you can just check out the video of the frosting printing robot below:

BeeHex Automated 3D Decorator

Pablos Holman Sees a Future Where We Print French Bread & Strawberries

While 3D food printing is still in its early stages, inventor/hacker Pablos Holman believes we’ll eventually live in a world where printers in our homes spit out complicated foods like French bread and even something resembling strawberries.

“This isn’t as weird as it sounds,” said Holman, who spends his days working in the lab at Intellectual Ventures, Nathan Myhrvold’s invention and research organization that has become one of the most prolific invention centers – as measured by patents filed and issued – in the world.

According to Holman, wheat and other materials within bread could be stored in “printer” cartridges and turned into bread at the push of a button.

“What a chef is doing is putting wheat through a complicated process to manage texture,” said Holman. “What my 3D printer would do is put down a pixel of wheat, hydrate with a needle, zap it with a laser to cook it, rinse and repeat for every pixel, and it’s going to print you a meal.”

While it’s weird to think of foods traditionally cooked by humans instead being printed on printers, Holman thinks this method is vastly superior to the one-sized-fits-all production method of traditional kitchens.

“The (3D printed) meal is customized and customized for you,” said Holman, who before working at Intellectual Ventures helped to start Jeff Bezos’ space travel company, Blue Origin. “It avoids your allergens, and dietary restrictions and injects your pharmaceuticals.”

In short, Holman believes 3D printed meals could be optimized for each person’s specific dietary requirements and taste profile. “Now we have a way of correlating your diet to health effects. If you have to get off of sodium, we’ll drop it by one milligram a day for months, and you’ll never feel it happen.”

“Unless you have a personal chef, it’s almost impossible for people to do that kind of thing right now,” Holman continued. “What we really want to do is have the computer to know what you ate, know what health effects you are experiencing are, know how to tune your meals so that they’re optimized for you.”

In Holman’s view, the biggest challenge to ushering in a world of personalized printed food will be managing texture. But, he believes, it’s a challenge that is hardly insurmountable: “When you think about what a chef is doing, they’re managing flavor, managing aroma, managing nutrition and they’re managing texture,” said Holman. “I can buy flavor in a bottle. I can buy aroma in a bottle. I can both nutrition in a bottle. What’s left is managing texture.”

And, as Holman sees it, developing 3D food printers that can create food textures that are pleasing to the human tongue is just another step forward on centuries-long creativity continuum that brought us food like French bread and pasta. “We learn new textures are the time,” he said. “God did not invent pasta or French bread. Those are inventions. Humans make those.”

Holman is not shy about sharing this view. Five years ago he went to Parma, Italy, the birthplace of pasta, to speak at Barilla headquarters where he “told a room of full of twelve hundred Italians that God did not invent pasta.”

While Holman hasn’t been invited back, Barilla may have gotten the message anyway: The world’s largest pasta company has since launched its own 3D pasta printer.

If you want to listen to the full conversation with Pablos Holman to hear his views on the evolution of 3D food printing, the development of Intellectual Ventures lab and more, you can download the podcast here, get it on Apple podcasts or just click play below.

Want To Print Your Food? Better Hurry And Buy A Foodini Before They’re Gone

While the big 3D printing companies have yet to deliver on food printing, a small Spanish startup called Natural Machines has been quietly working on a 3D food printer for five years and started shipping it in small batches in the last couple of years.

Because the Foodini is one of the very few commercially available 3D food printers, they’ve become the go-to printer for high-end culinary adventurers. You can find Foodinis everywhere from Michelin star restaurants like La Boscana to Icelandic food research institutes to Randi Zuckerberg’s Sue’s Tech Kitchen.

The Foodini: How to use it

But if you want to pick up a Foodini – which prints by extruding food from stainless steel capsules the user preloads with anything they deem “printable” – be warned: the printer is often hard to find. That’s because the company only had an initial small production run of the printers which sold out last year.

However, we have good news: Natural Machines just announced they have more Foodini printers available for customers ready to cough up the $4,000 retail price.

Here’s what company founder Emilio Sepulveda said about the new production run via email:

Foodini is already officially in production: we successfully completed and shipped a production run at the same price point we are offering you today. We kept the first production run to a small volume to test the manufacturing lines. We’re very happy with the output and the high quality of Foodini, and we are now moving forward with a larger – yet limited quantity – production run. The initial production run sold out in a short period of time, and due to demand we expect the same thing will happen with this production run… so place your order quickly.

There are other products that print food such as pancakes and pizzas, but the Foodini is one of the few multi-food printers on the market. 3D Systems, one of the big two 3D printer companies, handed over production of its 3D food printer to bakery products company CSM last year, but CSM has yet to make the product commercially available.

So if you want to buy a 3D food printer, you might want to hurry and put in an order for a Foodini before they run out.

You can take a look at 3D rendering of the Foodini below:

Thanks to This Los Angeles Startup, The Internet Now Comes In Different Flavors

The Internet: that remarkable tool we use everyday to get the latest sights, sounds, and  ideas. 

But what about tastes? Yep, that too.

While replicating flavor through sensors is a ways off still from becoming the norm, one startup offers a simpler way to taste what’s online: 3D popsicles. Using its own 3D technology, Los Angeles-based Pixsweet can combine raw food materials (pureed fruit, sugar) with pretty much any image you grab online to create its frozen treats. Peruse the company’s Instagram page, and you’ll find popsicles at birthdays, weddings, and corporate events, rendered as unicorns, hastags, and sports logos.

That said, Pixsweet has bigger goals than simply charming partygoers with frozen pops.

Company co-founder Janne Kyttanen’s work in 3D printing goes all the way back to the 1990s (his latest stop before founding Pixsweet was as Creative Director for industry giant 3D Systems). Bringing the technology to people’s homes has always been a dream, though he realized early on that scalability and the cost of materials were roadblocks that wouldn’t be cleared overnight. So in 2016, he teamed up with serial entrepreneur Eduard Zanen and turned to a cheaper, more sustainable material: food.

The $3 trillion food-production market has a lot of brands but few players. By most estimates, a grand total of 10 companies control practically every major food and beverage brand in the world. That leaves very little room for smaller companies to compete; experimenting with materials, flavors, and shapes is cost prohibitive. Knowing all of this, Pixsweet started using 3D printing as a way to supply local stores with options that can be both affordable and more original than the average ice cream snack.

Why popsicles? “The shape of popsicles hasn’t changed in over 120 years,” Laura Kyttanen, Pixsweet’s head of marketing, explains. Most other sweet treats have altered at least a little, from gummy bears to the ill-fated lemon meringue Oreo. The Pixsweet folks quickly realized that, armed with 3D-printing technology, the same variety of shape and flavor could be done for popsicles.

Part of the reason this is possible is the simple process behind the product. For any given order, 3D technology connects to open APIs that allow users to choose and upload an image from anywhere online. Using a patent-pending 3D thermo-injection technology (3DTi), Pixsweet turns the raw material into popsicles at the rate of 1.3 seconds a pop. Right now you can order by batches of 100, and there may soon even be the option to get non-frozen shipments (another patent pending).  

Widespread adoption with average consumers is a long-term goal, but in the meantime, Pixsweet stays busy making a name for itself in the event space. Whether it’s blind taste tests at art shows, showing up at Coachella, or doing collaborations with Warner Brothers, Pixsweet’s 3D-printed treats combine advertising with refreshments at a fraction of the cost most companies spend on just one of those at an event.

The branding, particular, is a huge part of Pixsweet’s overall mission. Kyttanen refers to it as “sensory branding,” and says the company’s goal is to introduce a new medium to the world of marketing: taste. “You’re basically able to add a new sense to your brand or anything you’re trying to communicate,” she says. “How does your brand taste?” is a question she often asks clients. This isn’t just a way to determine whether a company prefers strawberry to kale. Contemplating the taste of your brand forces you to carefully consider what it’s really about. In other words, you can’t just hit autopilot and regurgitate the company mission statement; you have to understand your business on a much deeper level.

“A lot of times as a company, you spend a big amount of money on marketing and branding,” she adds. “Now you can do that with this food product and go viral without spending as much as you would on an advertisement.”

Maybe taste it the new online frontier. So whether you’re throwing a music festival or planning a Bar Mitzvah, consider what your next event might taste like if it were rendered in ice and choose your flavor accordingly.

If you want to taste a Pixsweet popsicle, make sure to come to the Smart Kitchen Summit, where Pixsweet is one of 15 Startup Showcase finalists. Use discount code SPOON to get 25% off of tickets. 

It’s Alive! 3D Systems Partners With CSM To Bring ChefJet 3D Food Printer To Market

When 3D Systems signaled an entry into the 3D food printing market with the acquisition of Sugar Labs in 2013, many in the world of tech got excited.  And why not? Not only was this a sign that one of the 3D printing world’s biggest players was about to throw its weight and resources behind perhaps the most underdeveloped category in 3D printing, but is also meant that we’d maybe soon have cool stuff to print at home other than cheap plastic.

And at first, the company’s early moves only fed the excitement of foodtech and 3D printing enthusiasts around the world. By the next year they’d announced the ChefJet Pro, and soon they were at CES in 2014 printing out confections and talking up a 2015 ship date.

But before long, the enthusiasm faded and signals that ChefJet’s development was stalled became more and more frequent. The company’s initial plans of a 2015 ship date came and went, and eventually the ChefJet Pro and the category of culinary printing almost impossible to find on the company’s website. Throw in a little management trouble and eventually one had to wonder: would the company ever follow through and bring the product to market?

The answer looks like yes, but not without a little help. That’s because this past week the company announced an a new partnership with CSM Bakery Solutions, a large provider of baking ingredients, supplies and technologies.

In a vaguely worded joint press release, the two companies announced what looks to be an exclusive development and licensing partnership.

From the release:

The global agreement allows the two industry leaders to join forces to bring innovative and creative 3D printed culinary products to the market. CSM will support the development of and have exclusive rights to utilize 3D Systems’ ChefJet Pro 3D printer for high-resolution, colorful food products for the professional culinary environment.

In other words, it looks like 3D Systems is essentially creating what looks like a joint venture with CSM to finally bring the ChefJet Pro to market.  While you could possibly quibble with the meaning of “high-resolution, colorful food products for the professional culinary environment”, it looks to me like CSM has exclusive rights to the ChefJet Pro in the professional market. And, since the ChefJet Pro doesn’t look like it will be coming out in a home version anytime soon, this effectively means the company has exclusive rights to the ChefJet Pro period.

What does this mean?

On one hand I think it’s good, since other than an article about the Culinary Institute of America’s work with ChefJet Pro prototypes a year ago, there has been no update on the the status from 3D Systems about the ChefJet Pro in two and a half years. With this news, we know 3D Systems has not completely given up on the ChefJet Pro and that, eventually, it will come to market.

We also know from this news that the company decided it needed help in bringing the product to market. While I’m sure part of the rationale is to let CSM help fund any remaining development of the product, I also think they probably realized they needed to tap into the expertise of a large baking goods product company since, after all, that’s the the target market for the ChefJet Pro.

And lastly, while it looks like the probability of a ChefJet for the home doesn’t look good at this point, the wording of press release seems to indicate that 3D Systems has retained rights to a consumer product. So while a home ChefJet doesn’t look like it’s in the offing anytime soon, as Jim Carrey said in Dumb and Dumber, “you’re telling me there’s a chance.”

Bottom line, while some big food companies are exploring the possibilities of 3D printing, we are still very much in the research and exploration phase of this market. With that in mind, I’ll take it as a positive that one of 3D printing’s biggest company’s is slowly but surely moving towards commercializing a 3D food printer, even if it has to do it with the help of a friend.

Update 8/21/17: Liz von Hasseln, Culinary Creative Director and the cofounder of Sugar Lab (which 3D Systems acquired in 2013 to start their food printing division) emailed me with the following statement:

“Our partnership with CSM is focused on bringing the ChefJet Pro to market. Essentially, CSM will be manufacturing the food materials that the printer uses, and 3D Systems will be manufacturing the printer itself. At launch, CSM will handle sales for both. The exclusivity refers to their right to sell the system exclusively–it does not effect its availability.”

While I was right about CSM’s exclusivity, this information from von Hasseln sheds additional light on the deal. CSM clearly sees a new opportunity to extend its baking supplies and ingredient business into printed food, while 3D Systems will rely on CSM as the primary channel to market.

Technology Innovation Adds New Dimension To Pasta Making

Alas, finally technology for those who like to play with their food.

Give its universal popularity, pasta is a natural prime target for entrepreneurs wanting to leave an imprint on the future of food. Living at the intersection of smart food techniques and future consumer trends are methods to shapeshift ordinary macaroni noodles into 3D wonders that delight the eye and tickle the palate.

Similar to those animal-shaped sponges that mysteriously grow when submerged, researchers at MIT have developed gelatin-based discs that separate and form origami-like three-dimensional shapes when dunked in hot water or broth. Not only are these creations fun to eat, their practical purpose is saving space during transport to retailers and consumers.

“We did some simple calculations, such as for macaroni pasta, and even if you pack it perfectly, you still will end up with 67 percent of the volume as air,” Wen Wang, a research scientist at MIT told the Tribune of India.

“We thought maybe in the future our shape-changing food could be packed flat and save space,” said Wang.

Shapeshifting pasta

According to MIT, researchers took their discovery to a chef at a leading Boston restaurant. The collaboration led to discs of gelatin flavored with plankton and squid ink, that quickly wrap around small beads of caviar. They also created long fettuccini-like strips, made from two gelatins that melt at different temperatures, causing the noodles to spontaneously divide when hot broth melts away certain sections.

The next step would be to see if the process will work with more traditional pasta ingredients such as eggs, flour and water.

Not to be left behind the innovation curve for indigenous food, Parma, Italy-based Barilla Group, has come up with a 3D pasta printer. In the works for more than three years, Barilla teased the market in 2014 by holding a 3D pasta printing competition. Winners made pasta in the shape of roses, Christmas trees and full moons, resulting in forms able to hold more sauce as well as dazzle the eye.

BARILLA - 3d pasta presented at Expo 2015

In 2016 at the CIBUS International Food Exhibition, Barilla showcased a working prototype of a pasta printer that is able to make four different shapes, each in under two minutes. The device, built in conjunction with Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research (TNO) uses pre-made pasta cartridges loaded with Durum Wheat Semolina and water. Custom-made extruders deliver the final product.

At the 2016 event, Fabrizio Cassotta, Barilla’s Innovation Pasta, Ready Meals and Smart Food Manager, explained to 3ders.org, “All you need to do is load the dough cartridges in the machine and that’s it. It takes only a few minutes: you choose the pasta shape you want and the data is sent to the printer that materializes ready-to-cook pasta, shaped as cubes, moons, roses or many other shapes. Never seen before pasta shapes made with our favorite ingredients,” he says. Premade shapes can be selected using a tablet or smartphone.

Barilla will initially target restaurants and shops that sell fresh pasta before taking aim at the consumer market.

A second 3D pasta printing contest, sponsored by Barilla and administered by Desall.com, ended in early May with more than 1,100 entries with new designs. No winners have been announced.

Who Is Interested in 3D Food Printing? Young People, That’s Who

3D food printing is still one of those futuristic technologies that most people have yet to experience and many think sounds kinda weird, but with more investment dollars flowing into startups to help us print our food, there’s a good chance many of us might just eat ‘printed’ food in the next few years.

We decided to ask regular consumers if they would want to print their food using a 3D food printer. In a survey of over one thousand US households, we asked consumers to rate their interest in being able to ‘print simple foods like dessert using a home 3D food printer’.

So what did we find? While just a quarter (24.7%) of those surveyed said they were “very interested” or “interested”, nearly 4 in 10 those aged under 30 were intrigued by the concept. Those between 30 and 44 also showed higher than average interest (33%). Those 45 and older weren’t too enamored with the idea of food printing, with only 19% of those aged between 45 and 59 expressing interest and only 11% of those 60 or older willing to give printed food a try.

For those interested, they may have to wait a while. While professional applications of 3D food printing are starting to see traction in restaurants and pop up stores, the consumer 3D food printing market is still very much in its infancy. However, early experiments like the PancakeBot have shown strong interest, so maybe if someone builds a true consumer priced 3D food printer, they – meaning young people – will come.

BeeHex Gets $1 Million Investment To Create 3D Food Printer

3D food printing has been one of those categories that has wowed folks at pop up restaurants and trade shows, but has yet to attract much in the way of investment dollars.

Until now. That’s because BeeHex, a company created when CEO Anjan Contractor won a contract with NASA to develop a pizza printer for space, has landed $1 million in seed funding from pizza mogul Jim Grote, founder of Donatos Pizza.

The first BeeHex product, the Chef 3D, will be targeted at professional environments, starting with pizza restaurants and later extending into other types of food.

As Grote told Techcrunch,  “After pizza, this technology could be used for a wide range of foods. The company has mastered the technology around dough, which is a real challenge. So it would make sense to expand into other baked goods, potentially.”

Jordan French, BeeHex CMO, told The Spoon that he thinks the commercial and novelty market for 3D food printing is much further along than the consumer market. Kids restaurants, fairs and festivals make lots of sense for a food printer from BeeHex.

Unlike traditional 3D printers that use additive manufacturing and materials like powders, the BeeHex system uses pneumatic systems to dispense ingredients.

BeeHex joins other companies such as Natural Machines and 3D Systems in the race to make market viable 3D food printers.

Why don’t you subscribe to our free weekly newsletter to get great analysis like this in your inbox?

The Year In 3D Food Printing

2016 shall forever be the year that printed pizza became a thing thanks to a technologist from NASA. 3D food printing hit the scene this year in a big way, and though it’s not quite ready for mainstream home use, the technology and use cases are starting to disrupt the way chefs, food chains, grocery stores and even consumers are thinking about preparing fresh food.

Pancakes and pizza and pasta…oh my 

The concept behind 3D food printing is very similar to the one behind 3D printing; raw materials are loaded into cartridges and a design (or in the case of food, a recipe) is programmed into the machine. The printer then uses the materials to produce a three-dimensional rendering of the design – in the case of traditional 3D printing, the rendering is made of plastic. In the case of 3D food printing, it could be anything, as long as its edible.

3D food printing as an industry is still in its infancy but started to gain traction in 2016. Startups appeared creating bots that printed pasta, pancakes, cheesecake – even pizza. Companies like BeeHex burst onto the scene at SXSW in Austin, printing delicious flatbread pizzas with real mozzarella, fresh dough and tomato sauce. But BeeHex isn’t just any startup, it came from the brain of engineer and tech celebrity Anjan Contractor, the guy who just happened to invent NASA’s 3D food printer with the goal of sending it on manned missions to Mars. Contractor then joined three other partners to use the technology and create a similar machine, one that would print tasty pizza efficiently and “create a new food experience–using robots–to make customized food cleaner, healthier and faster.”

BeeHex’s B2B model is squarely aimed at disrupting commercial kitchens and food chains who currently use manpower and older cooking technology to prepare food for customers. So even though you might get to taste the creations of a BeeHex machine from your local pizza joint, you probably won’t be able to buy one for your kitchen anytime in the near future.

But there are some companies building 3D food printing for consumer kitchens and the options range from the specific to the versatile to the futuristic.

Your face. On a pancake.

While several 3D printing startups are attempting to take their product to market, there’s few options for actually buying one today. One of those exceptions is a product called PancakeBot and it’s….pretty much exactly what it sounds like. PancakeBot is a printer bot that can be programmed to pump out pancake batter in any shape and cook it on a skillet. Invented by Miguel Valenzuela and backed on Kickstarter by over 2,000 backers, PancakeBot is a product you can buy today for around $300. But is printing things like pancakes on single devices the future of cooking in our kitchens?

Probably not, according to fellow Spoon contributor and food writer Megan Giller, who went and printed her face on a PancakeBot and wrote about it. The quality of the materials used and general premise behind PancakeBot seemed to put the company squarely in the novelty item camp. But the focus of the device is to put whimsical designs on a favorite breakfast item, not necessarily to change or alter the way we make food at home. And maybe it had to do with the watered down, generic batter they were using, but Megan’s experience was less than stellar.

“What I tasted was kind of like a flat, soggy animal cracker with alternating crispy and doughy bites.”

But the two things that might be wrong with PancakeBot – gimmicky premise and subpar raw ingredients – are the exact opposite approach of another startup trying to bring 3D food printing to our kitchens.

Foodini as the next microwave?

The raw materials used in 3D food printing falls into two categories: prepackaged, closed capsules that can be easily popped into a machine to print food and open capsules where fresh ingredients can be placed. The latter is the model used by Barcelona startup Natural Machines with their flagship product, the Foodini. Foodini is a 3D printer aimed at the consumer market – it’s designed to look a little like a countertop oven or microwave and uses a healthy eating and fresh ingredients approach as its hook. “Make fresh foods faster than by hand” is the theory behind Foodini and Natural Machines sees consumers popping fresh ingredients into the open capsules to create foods like pretzels, ravioli and breadsticks with no preservatives. It also makes all kinds of foods – from sweet to savory – and this point is a key differentiator as well. A decent amount of 3D food printing is singularly focused (see PancakeBot or BeeHex) or uses sugar as an easy, main source ingredient to craft desserts.

While Natural Machines wants their 3D food printer to be another countertop device, they don’t exactly expect that it will replace your current appliances. In fact, the device is really designed for consumers who already make foods from scratch – or consumers who want to but don’t because of time and convenience – and deliver an easier solution.

“Note that our proposition is not to say that everything you eat should be 3D printed, just like everything you eat now doesn’t come out of an oven.”

 

The Foodini hasn’t shipped yet, despite promises of shipping this year, and is in production and being beta tested in professional kitchens. The availability date is vague, with a “post-2016” date listed on the website and the anticipated price is a staggering $2,000. But this is a bold new venture, shipping a versatile, consumer 3D food printing device that’s meant to act and be seen as a kitchen appliance. The delays and high price reflect those factors and we’re anxious to see early reviews when it ships.

Liquid food from nūfood

Remember before when I said that 3D food printing was just like regular 3D printing except for the raw ingredients? In the case of UK startup nūfood, that’s not entirely true. nūfood, the 2016 Smart Kitchen Startup Showcase Winner, is changing the 3D printing game by patenting a new technique to create three-dimensional objects from liquids. The printed food maintains its shape until eaten, when the object liquefies again, amplifying the flavors. The encapsulation method they are working to patent means the liquid actually looks like a solid state until it’s eaten. The demo at the Summit was pretty incredible but it also showed that the nūfood approach takes a pretty scientific and futuristic approach to a technology that’s not even mainstream in its original form. But the nūfood creations are gorgeous and unique and their technology could be a game-changer for this growing space.

The future of machine printed food

At a recent 3D food printing conference in The Netherlands, there was clearly excitement about the market potential. The commercial world – restaurants and grocery chains – were already looking at 3D food printing as both an option for replacing current food prep systems and an entertainment opportunity. A panelist at the conference suggested that there could be a 3D food printer in every home in just two years.

The growth of 3D food printing in 2016 leaves the future wide open for more expansion – but also more questions. What industries will be influenced by the technology? What types of foods and ingredients can be printed in the future? And what precautions should be taken to ensure the safety and maintainability of 3D printed food? We’ll have to wait and see what 2017 will bring in the development of machine-created food.