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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

3d food printing

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.

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.”

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.

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

Barilla-Backed BluRhapsody To Launch 3D Pasta Printing E-Commerce Service in 2019

Have you ever wanted to create your own customized pasta inspired by a favorite work of art, company logo or the likeness of a standup comedian?

You may soon get your chance.

That’s because BluRhapsody, the pasta printing spinout of Barilla’s Blu1877 group, will launch an e-commerce platform in the coming months where anyone can order customized pasta printed by a Barilla-developed 3D pasta printer.

The new e-commerce offering is an expansion of an early limited direct-sales business in which BluRhapsody worked with a small handful of Michelin-star chefs to create customized pasta for their restaurants. With the new e-commerce offering, anyone will be able to go to BluRhapsody.com and order pre-designed custom pasta and, eventually, design their own and order it online.

According to BluRhapsody CTO Antonio Gagliardi, the company’s custom-created pasta capability will evolve through a couple phases. At first, customers will be able to go to BluRhapsody and order from a small catalogue of pre-designed pasta.  There will also be the ability for customers to start custom projects in which they work jointly with BluRhapsody to create unique pasta designs. Finally, the company plans to eventually offer a “customize-your-pasta page” where the customers use an interactive online tool to personalize the shape, ingredients, and even taste and texture of the pasta.

The transition from a one-off service that only worked directly with 5-10 chefs to one in which BluRhapsody becomes what is essentially a ‘Sculpteo for pasta’ was made possible because the company has made significant progress over the last couple years in developing their 3D pasta printing technology. According to Gagliardi, the company has moved beyond the initial prototype the company co-developed with the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO) to one based entirely on an internally developed design. With their new patent-pending pasta printer, BluRhapsody has optimized the design to print pasta with much greater efficiency.

Looking forward, I’m excited for an era of customized printed pasta. I can see a world where not only do restaurants big and small design their own unique designs, but average folks like myself create pasta for special occasions or gifts.

And who knows, maybe if Seinfield was a modern day sitcom, Fusilli Jerry would be printed rather than hacked together in Kozmo Kramer’s apartment.

Edible Carving: The World’s First 3D Printing Restaurant

3D printing has become the 21st century’s new manufacturing tool and is regularly applied in industries such as aerospace, automotive, fashion and healthcare, but in the last few years it has also made its way into professional kitchens. FOODINK is one key example of a company pioneering the use of food 3D printing and its founder, Antony Dobrzensky, believes the technology is an unstoppable force for the food industry.

FOODINK’s best known project and biggest milestone so far is “the world’s first 3D printing restaurant,” where everything is 3D printed on site, including the tables and chairs, the utensils and the food – all nine courses of it! The premiere took place in in Shoreditch, London, lasted three days and hosted 12 guests per day. The restaurant was later showcased in Barcelona and is now set for more worldwide destinations.

The idea was conceived and executed by Dobrzensky, (entrepreneur, technologist, investor) and his multi-talented international team, including chefs Mateu Blanch of Spanish molecular gastronomy restaurant La Boscana, and Joel Castanye an elBulli alumni with Arthur Mamou-Mani as the design advisor. Aside from this core team, Dobrzensky also brings in an outer circle of architects, artists, chefs, designers, engineers, futurists, industrials, inventors and technologists for advice and guidance.

The 3D printers themselves are made by ByFlow, a company based in Maastricht in The Netherlands. ByFlow has specialized in 3D printing since 2009 and in 2015 they developed a 3D food printer called ‘Focus’ which quickly entered the food industry. It’s no wonder FOODINK has partnered with the Dutch company as it says on their official website they believe “we can change the way people make and experience food.” For Dobrzensky too, 3D food printing isn’t just a throwaway trend and he says his team has devoted their knowledge, expertise and creativity to ensure that this revolutionary vision becomes a present experience.

The idea of 3D printed food may seem far fetched or perhaps something for the distant future, but when you consider the drastic changes already happening in the food industry now you can see why restaurants are interested. For example, flavour matters, but in a world dominated by images, what food looks like is becoming more and more important. According to a recent study by Maru/Matchbox 69 percent of millennials take photos of their food before eating it and many of those will be uploaded to social media. It’s no surprise then that Instagram has the power to influence the food we eat and the environment we eat it in. The prosperity for a certain image to go viral is driving restaurants to serve up eye catching dishes and fancy decorative drinks. FOODINK has shown that a 3D food printer can really help a restaurant stand out from competitors by creating new food designs which are impossible to do by hand or with traditional techniques.

Often food can compromise on flavour when the goal is to make it photogenic but for Dobrzsensky he believes they have found a way to not only retain a delicious taste but to keep it nutritious. When asked in a munchies interview, Dobrzsensky stated that “This food is made from all-natural ingredients and is more healthy and nutritious than food in other restaurants.” Chef Castanye adds that “We use the same ingredients but just served in a different way.” It seems that one of the most important factors to FOODINK’s approach is that they don’t disregard the chef and he/she still plays a pivotal role in the process. The fresh ingredients need to be chosen, cooked, blended and put in to tubes and there needs to be the right consistency in order to print successfully.

Food 3D printing is an exciting move for the world of food and technology and there’s a lot of potential. The stage for this change wasn’t set overnight. Years of innovation has led to the precipice of the food 3D printing revolution, and it seems that it is just a matter of time before we see advancements in speed and material capabilities that together will push the  technology in to a more user friendly domain. At some point, it might be as common to find a food 3D printer in a restaurant as it is to find a thermomix. We can only wait and see!

 

Edible Carving: Eating an Ecosystem

Edible Growth is a bite-sized  “mini vegetable garden with crispy plants and mushrooms”. It is also a 3D food printed project created by Eindhoven-based food designer Chloé Rutzerveld whose passion lies in rethinking the ways food is produced and consumed. The concept behind Edible Growth involves a specially printed outer casing made from dough that contains “edible soil” and various organisms (yeast, seeds and spores). Five days after printing, the plants and mushrooms germinate while the yeast ferments the solid inside into a liquid, after which they start to grow and poke through the holes of the casing – at which point it is ready to eat.

Most 3D food printers print using raw materials, which must be processed into a puree, powder or paste so that the printer can successfully extrude the food substance. However, in the case of fruit and vegetables, the process causes a significant decrease in nutritional value and loss of texture. Consequently, it is difficult to print healthy food and most 3D printed food is made from dough, sugar or chocolate. On her website Rutzerveld states that with the rise of more high-tech food and new production methods, consumers are becoming increasingly more concerned about their health as well as the quality and ‘realness’ of their food. This is why Rutzerveld has made it her mission to find a way of 3D food printing healthy, functional food.

Rutzerveld is not just proposing a way of using the 3D food printer as an extruder but wants to refigure the printer as not only a tool to enable natural growth but also to enhance it. Her design is a visualisation of how an edible ecosystem could look and opens up the possibility of a new food category – nutrient rich food that is eaten while still “in growth”. The design is currently a concept as current food printing techniques are not advanced enough and would involve several years of research and development. Nonetheless, there are many people interested in it’s potential. Rutzerveld’s main aim is to stimulate and provoke scientists, food technologists and designers to think differently when creating future food products.

Rutzerveld’s concept is not only a way to make a unique and new type of health food but she also sees how it can have environmental benefits. She foresees the possibility of home growth foods drastically reducing the need and strain on agricultural land. At the same time she believes post harvest and harvest labour would become unnecessary  and that farmers would be the providers of raw materials, not the fruits and vegetables themselves. As a result the consumer would become the farmer and will be more involved in the production of their food, without spending a lot of time gardening.

Edible Growth began in 2014 and has already been showcased in many countries around the world including the US, Asia, Canada and many countries in Europe. It has also been featured in several websites and magazines such as Frame, Mold and Vice. Four years on and the interest in Rutzerveld’s concept is by no means declining. Edible Growth is currently being displayed in Brazil’s Museum of Tomorrow and it is also featured in Rutzerveld’s book which is being launched this month (October 12th) – with world wide availability from early 2019.

Italian Bioengineer Spins Plants into Meat with 3D Printer

Texture and mouthfeel are big hurdles faced by manufacturers of meat alternatives. Making plants imitate the texture of a burger, a chicken nugget, or even a sausage can be tricky, sure; but imitating a chicken breast or fat-marbled steak is a whole other beast.

Italian bioengineer Giuseppe Scionti is working to find a way to do just that by leveraging a technology that’s been popping up throughout the food world: 3D printing. He has invented and patented a technology which uses a special 3D printer to produce plant-based meat with the same fibrous, “muscley” texture of animal meat. According to 3DPrinting.com, the printer uses syringes of plant protein pastes to create the steak and chicken simulacrums.

According to Il Fatto Quotidiano, Scionti can print 100 grams of meat in 30 minutes at the cost of two euros. However, the patent is meant to work for large-scale industrial processes, and he’s confident it will cost less as it increases in scale.

The use of 3D printing in the food world is still in its early stages. For now, it’s mainly used for its cool factor; after all, who doesn’t like watching a machine “print” out pasta noodles or geometric sugar sculptures or sushi? But as the technology evolves and the cost drops, 3D printing is poised to have a big impact on the food industry.

Interestingly, 3D printing has been touted as more of a manufacturing method for cell-based (or cultured) meat than for plant-based. San Francisco-based startup Just, Inc., which claims it’ll bring the first cell-based meat to market by the end of this year, has named 3D printing as part of their plans for large-scale production. By printing meat muscle strands, companies can mimic the texture of cuts of meat beyond burgers, meatballs, and sausages.

I couldn’t find any accounts of how Scionti’s 3D printed meats measured up in taste tests, but I’m optimistic about the potential of his technology. As we’ve covered extensively on the Spoon, there’s a strong and growing market for plant-based meats — especially ones that cook, taste, and bleed like the real thing. There are quite a few companies making burgers and sausages from plants, with reasonably good results. When we venture into chicken breasts, pork chops, and ribeyes, however, offerings become slim. And there’s clearly a market for them: Dutch company Vivera recently had to amp up production of their plant-based steaks to keep up with demand.

If companies can harvest 3D printing to expand their plant-based meat offerings, they may be able to reach a larger range of consumers. Chew on that.

3D printing company Nu Food will be showing off their printer and whipping up treats at next week’s Smart Kitchen Summit. We have a few tickets left, so snag yours now!

Edible Carving: How 3D printers Could Create Your Next Meal

Since its invention in the 1980s, 3D printing technology has evolved at lightning speed. A decade ago, the original technology — where physical objects are printed from 3D digital models — was only reserved for corporations and universities designing prototypes and architectural models. Today, smaller and more affordable, they can be easily seen in kitchens and storefronts, grade schools and homes.

3D food printing has found itself at the forefront of digitally printed objects. Currently, confectioneries around the world are using 3D printers to produce vibrant layers of candy. The culinary world is also using the technology to produce masterful desserts. Some entrepreneurs have gone further and opened restaurants that use 3D food printers to serve gourmet cuisines, such as Food Ink. Recent advancements in the 3D printing industry have also made it possible for these machines not only to print, but to also cook and then serve foods.

Food 3D printing represents a unique opportunity to go beyond aesthetic and tackle transformational change across economies, industries, global issues. Printers could create nutrient-rich and environmentally-friendly food products and even help address hunger problems in areas that need access to quality and affordable ingredients. The technology also creates an opportunity for food customization.

The Basic Principles

Current 3D food printers are designed to deposit small layers of material through a process called additive manufacturing — think of a frosting dispenser except the ingredients are squeezed out, layer by layer, by a robotic arm.

The latest models of 3D food printers are more complex and detailed. Examples of such devices are those used in the candy and baking industries. The 3D printer ChefJet crystallizes small layers of sugar into several geometric configurations, while Choc-Edge dispenses chocolate from syringes into intricate, delectable designs. Some advanced printers, such as The Foodini, use fresh ingredients filled in stainless steel containers to make different types of foods like stuffed pasta, pizza, brownies, and quiche.

Suffice it to say, 3D food printing technology is still developing and may hit new strides that will change food and the way people eat. But what does the future hold for 3D food printing? Will 3D food printers impact the food industry?

The Future: Customization and Health Impact

3D food printing is braced to have a big impact on the food industry. According to a 2018 Research Nester report, the 3D food printing market is expected to to expand at a compound annual growth rate of 50 percent during the period 2017-2024, and is expected to reach $400 million by 2024. The research suggests that the market growth is driven by two main factors: an increased desire for customization and applications from the healthcare sector.

Food industry places are making rapid advances with 3D food printing to ensure individuals and manufacturers can customize food products with regards to nutritional value, flavor, and ingredients. For example, consumers can tailor 3D printed food to their health requirement and taste. With this technology, it is possible to customize food for pregnant women, athletes, children, the elderly — people who commonly have very specific requirements in terms of nutrients. These devices can help people combine the right quantity of carbohydrates, fatty acids, minerals, vitamins, and other nutrients, helping consumers tailor food specifically to their individual dietary needs.

3D food printers can also allow for better control over portion sizes, cutting down on overconsumption and food waste. Moreover, they will have the capacity to turn raw ingredients into a healthy puree, making it easier for people with certain medical conditions who find eating whole foods challenging. German nursing homes are already using 3D food printers to make a pureed food product called “smoothfoods,” a mixture of fresh ingredients made into healthy, delicious molds that resemble their favorite dishes. This process allows the residents to enjoy food without fear of choking, discomfort or pain. There is also WASP, a 3D printing company in Italy, which is producing gluten-free products of popular foods, such as pastries in the shape of gnomes.

The Challenges

Despite the many exciting possibilities of 3D food printing technology, the industry still has challenges to overcome. To print food using the current 3D printer, users must convert their ingredients into a paste. It is the only way the device can manipulate the ingredients. Furthermore, most printers available today are designed for dry and shelf-stable materials, excluding most dairy and protein products that spoil faster. That means every ingredient must be dry otherwise users will have to worry that something could spoil. It is a matter of food safety. And while there is hype about 3D printed food and the technology in general, it is important to measure expectations. In simple terms, we must continue to consider the health, environmental and social impacts of food printing.

The 3D printing examples may seem anecdotal or out of reach, but expect to see more mainstream application of this technology in the future. 3D food printing is more than a fleeting curiosity, it’s a powerful tool that can forever change the way we make, choose and eat food.

As this article on the IQS Directory points out, 3D printing is hot and it’s only going to get hotter. Follow this series in the forthcoming weeks to learn more about some singular food makers who are shaping the food 3d printing space!

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: