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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

3d printing

Video: Dovetailed’s CEO Imagines a 3D-Printed Food Future

At last year’s Smart Kitchen Summit by the Spoon, Vaiva Kalnikaitė, CEO of unconventional design studio and innovation lab Dovetailed, took the stage to talk about one of food futurists’ favorite topics: edible 3D printing. “Over the last few years, I’ve been exploring how we can design new dining experiences using various different types of technology,” she said. And the one that caught — and captured — her interest was 3D food printing.

There are a few companies working in the edible printing area. Some like Foodini extrude pastes to make food that must then be cooked or dried, like pasta; others like ChefJet print with sugar molecules; and then there’s Dovetailed, which has developed a pretty cool way to print with liquids. Despite its popularity as an idea, the number of companies actually applying 3D printing technology to food is relatively few.

But Kalnikaitė thinks that it won’t be this way for long. “Perhaps this is the shape of taste to come,” she said to the audience. “I’m really excited about the 3D printing of food in general and I think that it has a lot of potential.”

It might be a slow road, however. “One of the challenges is the way that we’re trying to retrofit 3D printed food into the same practices we use for traditional cooking,” said Kalnikaitė.

Watch the video below to see her lay out her vision for the future of 3D food printing. And if you want to hear more from innovators who are disrupting the way we grow, cook, and eat our food, make sure to register for SKS Europe in Dublin on June 11-12th.

Imagining A Printed Food Future from The Spoon on Vimeo.

Smart Kitchen News Roundup: Personalized Pints, The World’s Best Steak, & Ranch Dressing

It’s been a big week for the smart kitchen, so we’re doing a quick roundup of some of our favorite food tech news stories that we didn’t have time to turn into full pieces.

Speaking of smart kitchens: we just returned from the Housewares Show in Chicago! If you want to read about some of the cool new products and trends we saw (cough, guided cooking, cough), check out this post and look out for a recap podcast coming your way soon.

Introducing Beer Ripples

Beer Ripples lets you personalize your pints

Just in time for St. Patrick’s day, latte art-printing company Coffee Ripples is bringing their technology behind the bar. Their edible 3D-printing technology allows you to print any imagine that moves you on a pint. Dubbed Beer Ripples, the machine, intended solely for commercial use, uses an edible malt-based ink to transfer designs, text, and images onto your brew’s foamy top. Imbibers can either choose from options on Ripples’ library or upload a custom image onto the Ripple app using their foam. It’s not cheap—the machine is priced at $3,000 plus an $1,500 annual subscription fee—but in a world run by Instagram, it may help give bars an extra buzz.

 

Photo: Hidden Valley website.

Hidden Valley dips into Allrecipes/Amazon Fresh partnership

This week the media and marketing company the Meredith Corporation announced that Hidden Valley will be the first advertising partner to take advantage of the Allrecipes/Amazon Fresh integration. Now when users select shoppable recipes from Allrecipes that call for bottled ranch or powdered ranch mix, a Hidden Valley product will automatically be added to their AmazonFresh shopping cart and delivered to their doorstep. In addition to geo-targeted offers and ads, users will see a “May We Suggest” native recipe integrations pushing Hidden Valley ranch as a pairing whenever they click on pizza recipes. Customers can switch out Hidden Valley for another brand if they wish, but this partnership is just a taste of how CPG’s will use shoppable recipes as a tool to take advantage of the growing egrocery market.

 

Photo: Crowd Cow website.

Crowd Cow expands to Japan

Crowd Cow, the startup which helps people directly source meat by crowdfunding a cow online, has expanded their reach into Japan. They now offer A5 Wagyu beef sourced from Kagoshima, a rare cut of meat which their website claims is “the world’s most marbled steak.” This expansion shows that Crowd Cow’s model of direct-delivering specific cuts of whole cows has some market power behind it. It also speaks to the growing demand for ethically sourced luxury beef. If you’re interested, Crowd Cow’s A5 Wagyu will go on sale on March 19th, and promises to sell out pretty quickly. Get your Béarnaise sauce ready.

 

Photo: SmartQ website.

SmartQ gets funding to facilitate food court experience

This week the Chennai-based food tech startup SmartQ raised $1 million from Dubai-based investors. Founded in 2014, SmartQ aims to eliminate cafeteria lines by “digitizing food courts.” Their suite of products includes a food ordering app, a self ordering kiosk, and a POS system to facilitate restaurant billing. While keeping all of those services straight may seem more complicated than just waiting in line, SmartQ’s products are catching on in food courts around India. The company has been growing 50% month to month, and currently has big players Shell and Epsilon as clients. SmartQ hopes to use their funding to grow their business outside of India.

 

Photo: PR Newswire Asia

2018 AWE wowed with smart kitchen appliances

Smart kitchen gadgets abounded this week at the 2018 Appliance & Electronics World Expo (AWE) in Shanghai this week. Consumer appliance manufacturer Midea showed off some pretty snazzy demos appliances like their second generation Fun oven, which uses AI and machine learning to recognize foods and calculate the perfect cooking curve. There was also a voice-controlled microwave and a range hood with steam cleaning and air purification capabilities. Also at AWE, Chinese appliance company Haier debuted their smart home solution, featuring a smart fridge with a built-in camera which can see your food and recommend recipes accordingly.

Dessert Meets Tech and It’s Love at First Bite

It’s February 14, which means sappy love songs, heart-shaped chocolate boxes, and . . . 3D printing?

As Michael Wolf predicted in his prescient post “10 Trends Shaping the Future of Cooking in 2018,” dessert-tech is a market that’s growing fast. From intelligent ovens that speed up the cookie-making process to a whole mess of ice cream innovation, we’ve rounded up some of the sweetest (sorry) pairings in dessert-tech for your V-day holiday pleasure.

Desserts On Demand:

Some chocolate made-to-order ice cream from Solo Gelato.

Solo Gelato

This Israeli-based startup is basically applying the Keurig system to desserts. Currently, their capsules containing ice cream mixture are quite a bit bigger than the coffee pods, though the two systems work in a very similar way: after the Solo Gelato capsules are inserted, the machine “freezes and expels air” into them. Sixty seconds later, out comes fresh gelato. The company’s website also boasts a cloud-based database and “state of the art mechanical and cooling solutions.” Solo Gelato currently boasts a lineup of 24 flavors, with offerings including sorbet, traditional ice cream, and even boozy treats for the 21+ crowd.

Churned-to-order ice cream made with the freezing power of liquid nitrogen has been around for a few years. However, bringing on-demand ice cream into your home, Solo Gelato is hoping to “disrupt the ice cream industry” in the very way that coffee pods disrupted the coffee industry. (Side question: to what extent have coffee pods really done that?)

Tigoût

Another dessert company piggybacking off the Keurig model is the Argentinian startup Tigoût—though really, they’re more like a souped-up Easy-Bake Oven. How it works: pop two capsules into their designated slots in the top of the machine (I’m assuming one is liquid and one is dry ingredients, but no details are given). In just a few minutes (again, no details on cook time are given) you get a freshly baked pastry. According to LinkedIn, the startup is preparing to launch a minimum viable product (MVP) and has a patent in process.

Tigoût also has an integrated app which allows you to order more pastry capsules, monitor your baking process and set alarms. As of now, Tigoût offers seven different types of dessert capsules ranging from chocolate fudge to a caramel “volcano.”

CHiP’s cookie oven promises fresh, homemade cookies in 10 minutes.

CHiP Cookie Oven

What if instead of having a warm, melty chocolate chip cookie in, say, an hour—taking into account the time to soften the butter, make the dough, shape it, and bake it—you could get your mitts on one in only 10 minutes? That’s the promise of CHiP, a smart oven that uses patent-pending convection cooking technology to speed up the cookie baking process.

For all the tech nerds out there, CHiP is also wifi-enabled and can integrate into your smart-home system. Customers can order cookie dough pods in a variety of flavors, including vegan and gluten-free options, which are clad in biodegradable parchment paper for easy insertion into the oven. Milk not included.

Less Sugar, Less Dairy

Healthier options are another big trend in the dessert-meets-tech sphere, especially when it comes to ice cream. Vegan, non-dairy, high-protein and low-sugar desserts are gaining popularity, as proven by the runaway success of HaloTop. The low-calorie treat, which became the No. 1 best-selling ice cream in U.S. grocery stores in 2017, and other ice cream brands are scrambling to cash in on the healthier trend. Plant-based desserts such as the coconut-based ice cream NadaMoo!, non-dairy Ben & Jerry’s, and a whole host of vegan ‘screams have been rising rapidly in popularity.

NadaMoo! is a coconut-based ice cream based in Austin, TX.

However, not all health-conscious ice creams come in pint form. Veru is a company that uses patent-protected flash-freezing technology to make ice pops that are low-calorie, additive free, and (apparently) still manage to taste good. They make use of our old friend liquid nitrogen to freeze their ice cream mixes to temperatures as low as -196 degrees Celsius in just seconds. This quick freeze allows them to preserve maximum flavor so that they can cut calories without sacrificing on taste.

3D Printing

Another pioneer in the frozen-dessert field is Pixsweet, an L.A.-based company that participated in the Smart Kitchen Summit startup showcase last year. Pixsweet makes customizable, 3D-printed popsicles, so you can turn everything from brand logos to unicorns into edible pops.

The pop possibilities are endless!

Pastry chefs are another group embracing the edible 3D printing trend. One of the most popular, who has also become an internet darling, is Dinara Kasko, an architect-turned-pastry chef known across the web for her sculptural desserts (just check out her 555,000 Instagram followers). Kasko uses computer modeling software to make intricate molds, which she then 3D prints and uses to make her custom cakes. The popularity of her desserts and the customizable pops from Pixsweet suggest 3D printing might play a significant role in the future of dessert.

Dessert Meal Subscription Kits

It seems that no matter your lifestyle and dietary preference, there’s a meal kit for that. Now sweet lovers can sate their sugary cravings with Sweetbake, a food subscription service from Nestle (its first) that caters to those with a sweet tooth. For $35 per month, subscribers get two ready-to-bake kits—just add milk, butter, and eggs. At first glance, it’s like a fancier version of boxed brownies, only you get the added thrill of receiving mail. However, Sweetbake’s repertoire extends far beyond chocolate chip cookies; their kits have ingredients for everything from gingerbread biscotti to peppermint brownie cups.

One of sweetbake’s dessert subscription boxes.

They’re not the only company breaking into the dessert delivery kit sphere: companies foodstirs and SoBakeable also offer baking subscriptions. The latter even provides videos with recipes and baking tips for those who download the companion app.

What’s Next?

One dessert-meets-tech innovation we’d love to see at the Spoon is a home bean-to-bar chocolate-maker. As contributor Allen Weiner has pointed out, “the home chocolate market appears to be a large, untapped opportunity.” Tech entrepreneurs, smart kitchen gadget makers, and startup upstarts—we’ve got your next project ready for you.

Did we miss anyone doing exciting things in the dessert/tech field? Tell us in the comments!

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.

Sous Vide Chocolate?

Here’s more evidence that, as Chris Young hypothesized a few months ago, sous vide is the new microwave: People are using devices like the Anova to temper chocolate.

I know, I know: We all thought that chocolate appeared in its finished form like a magical food from the gods. But it actually takes a lot of steps to make a shiny, delicious chocolate bar, the last of which is tempering, which means heating and cooling the melted chocolate to the right temperature so that certain crystals develop, making it shiny and shelf-stable. If it’s not, it will develop white blotches and streaks that change the texture entirely.

Pastry chefs and chocolatiers use all sorts of methods to temper chocolate, such as “tabling” it, which is visually and technically challenging. Theo Chocolate, for example, tables all the chocolate for its confections (think thousands of candies every month).

People who aren’t such purists use, you know, a machine to do this work. Those machines are huge, so you’ll often find home cooks tempering chocolate in the microwave.

Or at least, you used to. Recently I discovered a new recipe for tempering chocolate that seems even easier: sous vide! Simply heat the chocolate in a vacuum-sealed bag to a certain temperature in the water bath, “squish it around in the bag,” reduce the temperature of the water bath, squish a little more, and then pull it out. Who says you can only use your Anova to make a steak or some eggs?

I love the idea of this shortcut. It uses updated technology (the microwave is so 1966) in a new and no-nonsense way to transform a technically difficult task into one that anyone should be able to do. At the same time, I’m not sure it would really work. After all, when melted chocolate touches water, it seizes and gets all clumpy and unworkable: With this method, you’re submerging chocolate in the enemy.

But I get it: We’re all obsessed with chocolate, and anything to get our hands on it is going to be popular. Take 3D printing. “The first thing people want to 3D print is chocolate,” said Luis Rodriguez Alcalde, a 3D-printing expert who runs 3 Digital Cooks. Dozens of printers claim that they’ve mastered printing chocolate, which means they have to have mastered tempering, right? Some even say it’s the easiest medium to work with. But anyone who has tried tabling chocolate or making it from scratch knows that’s far from the truth.

Regardless, this kind of innovation only helps transform the tools and techniques that professional and home chefs use in the kitchen, demystifying and democratizing cooking for all.

Subscribe to the Spoon to get the latest analysis about the future of food, cooking, and kitchen. 

What’s the Point of 3D-Printing Food?

Last week I reached an all-time low when my 3D printed Nutella selfie ended up looking like an art project by an untalented four-year-old. It made me reconsider why we’re so keen on 3D printing food in the first place.

After all, it’s not going to solve world hunger. It’s not going to change flavors or create new delicious textures. And it’s a long way off from being a cool, easy gadget to pull out of your kitchen cabinet and use at home.

But if used properly, it can be a provocative lens to examine both food and technology. That’s why 3 Digital Cooks’ Luis Rodriguez Alcalde is interested in it. The earnest 3D food printing expert has worked at Autodesk and Natural Machines on 3D food printing projects, and on his own site you’ll find him recording his own experiments both building printers and making food with them. Rodriguez says he got into 3D-printing food by accident: He was looking for cheaper, more accessible ingredients to use in general 3D-printing experiments. But the first time he brought one of his food printers to a maker fare, the audience was captivated. “People have a strong bond with food,” he said. “I don’t need to explain the technology to them, because they already understand food. They get it.”

He says he likes to use hummus to engage and teach chefs about the possibilities inherent in both technology and food. For example, he recently reconfigured a ZCorp 3D printer to work with sugar and made his own architecturally designed sugar cubes.

1ST PRINT!! ZCorp z310 DAY12

And that leads me to the other way that 3D-printed food could be useful: to make high-end, highly detailed decorative pieces, like on Cake Boss, but better. Confectioners, pastry chefs, and expert cake makers could use 3D printers to make elaborate sugar cake-toppers, for example.

Right now, though, it’s clear we’re still in the R&D phase of 3D printing. And the sooner we realize “it’s not the Star Trek replicator,” as Rodriguez likes to say, the better.

Eat My Face: I Made a 3D-Printed Nutella Selfie With the Discov3ry

This series explores the world of 3D printing through the most navel-gazing image possible: the selfie.

“Nutella selfie! Nutella selfie! Nutella selfie!” I repeated to myself in time to my footsteps as I walked to New Lab, a multidisciplinary design and technology center in Brooklyn, where Ultimaker is based. Apparently all I needed to do to make this a reality was hook up a paste extruder to the Ultimaker desktop 3D printer and my face in three-dimensional Nutella would be a reality.

Structur3D made a big splash in 2014 with its universal paste extruder called the Discov3ry. In reality it’s mostly a solution for 3D printing gaskets, but it garnered coverage everywhere from Mashable to Food & Wine with headlines such as “New 3-D Printing Accessory Will Create Your Portrait in Nutella,” all of them featuring a slick design that showed an amazing amount of detail and precision. So I thought this installment of “Eat My Face” would be a breeze.

Boy, was I wrong.

Yes, if you hook up the Discov3ry to an Ultimaker 3D printer, you can, in theory, print a selfie. But you need a 3D-printing Sherpa slash genius to guide you through the process.

Fortunately I had one: Luis Rodriguez Alcalde, who runs 3 Digital Cooks and has worked for Loomia, Autodesk, and Natural Machines. Luis helped me design a selfie that would work (think a simple cartoon with thick lines) while he connected the two setups and did some engineering magic to get them to work together. Then he took a photo of my picture and redesigned it in Tinkercad to, you know, actually work for 3D printing. Last he used Slic3r to generate G-code to convert our model into printing instructions for the Ultimaker. The PancakePainter this was not.

img_2735

Finally we were ready to print. And everyone in the entire open-air space of New Lab knew it: They were treated to the lovely sounds of the Ultimaker working, somewhere between a fax machine and dial-up modem. Plus it works really S L O W L Y, so they were able to enjoy these sounds for a good five minutes.

But whatever. Selfie. IN NUTELLA.

“Nutella was a smart choice,” said Matt Griffin, the director of community for Ultimaker, as we watched the machine do its work. “It behaves like a thermoplastic,” which means it’s the ideal consistency to print.

Uh, something like that. The Discov3ry didn’t offer nearly the precision as other getups I’ve written about, and the Nutella expanded on the cake after it was extruded from the tube. Here was the result:

img_2736

One 3D printer, one 3D printing add-on, two experts, one writer, six hours, and one Nutella “selfie.”

Eat My Face: I made a 3D-Printed Pancake Selfie With the PancakeBot

This series explores the world of 3D printing through the most navel-gazing image possible: the selfie.

He seemed surprised that I wanted to eat it. I was standing in the middle of Storebound’s New York City offices with a plate of my face in pancake form hot off the 3D printer, staring at the guy who’d just helped me engineer my breakfast.

“Do you have any maple syrup?” I asked.

I had been waiting for this moment for a while. As soon as I’d heard about the PancakeBot, a gizmo that would PRINT PANCAKES, I’d known those flapjacks were in my future.

You start by either choosing a design from the archives or drawing an original image with the PancakePainter app. I’d used the PancakePainter to make a pretty rooky cartoon of myself.

MeganCartoons

Save it to an SD card, pop it in the printer, and hit a few buttons and the PancakeBot draws the image in batter onto a griddle: A pump forces the air into the nozzle holding the batter, causing it to dispense, and a vacuum keeps the batter in place. The printer moves the nozzle over the griddle, tracing the lines you drew on your screen. Dark lines on the image are painted first so the batter can cook longer while lighter sections on the image are painted last. Here’s a slick video to explain the process.

After an inventor named Miguel Valenzuela made the first version out of LEGOs for his daughters, Storebound started working with him on a Kickstarter to see if there was demand. Turns out there was: In less than 30 days more than 2,000 backers pledged more than $460,000, and they’ve sold more than 1,000 units at $300 a pop. Now you can get a pancake printer at a Sears near you (and a host of other places). Legal firms, small businesses like bakeries, and even a 3D-car-printing company have all bought one, as well as many families.

Storebound says they see this as an educational product, something designed to get kids and adults into the kitchen and teach them about viscosity, temperature, and pressure. Sure, that might be true for a few minutes when they first pull it out of the box, but let’s call this what it is: novelty. More disturbing to me is the idea that we’re trying to teach kids how to cook without considering the actual ingredients they’re cooking: Storebound demoes the machine with Aunt Jemima’s, which they water down so that the finished product resembles something somewhere between a crepe and a pancake. You could use your own scratch-made batter to step it up a notch, but that’s clearly not the point of the printer. To me the most exciting thing about 3D printing in the kitchen is that it will elevate food by making it easier to prepare or better-tasting, not that it will become a onetime gimmick.

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After waiting about 10 minutes for my pancake to print, I couldn’t wait to bite into it. What I tasted was kind of like a flat, soggy animal cracker with alternating crispy and doughy bites. In other words, the PancakeBot might get you pumped about your breakfast, but in the end you’ll probably go hungry.

FabCafe Serves a Side of 3D Printing With Your Coffee

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Sure, you can get a latte to go at Japanese café FabCafe, but you might be missing the point. The innovative café from digital production company Loftwork takes 3D printing and robotics to the next level, with elaborate projects and workshops that allow its customers to experiment for themselves and create unique gifts and takeaways. The mini chain has just opened its seventh location, in Singapore, with other outposts in Japan, Taiwan, Spain, Thailand, and France. This year it plans to open yet two more locations, one in Europe and another in Asia.

Here are a few of its most amazing adventures.

Your Head, in Chocolate

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In 2013 FabCafe hosted a workshop with partner KS Design Lab that allowed its patrons the chance to get a full body 3D scan, 3D-print a mold of their head using a ProjetHD printer, fill it with chocolate, and plant the resulting edible treat in a box of bonbons for Valentine’s Day.

Another idea? Customized 3D-printed gummy selfies! Unlike the lame ones at Dylan’s Candy Bar, these are actually 3D and totally look like you.

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You can still make a customized bust of your head in plastic, not chocolate (sorry), at the café: It only takes about three hours.

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Also make personalized stamps, puzzles, tote bags, and more.

Robots Make the Best Coffee

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As part of a recent exhibit hosted at FabCafe in Japan, Bubble Lab showcased its robot arm coffee maker, which would make you a delicious single-origin coffee pour over.

Play With Your Food

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3D-print a special message on a macaron or a piece of white bread. It only takes about 30 minutes for the cookie and 15 for the bread, plus the time you’ll need to fiddle with your design on the iPad. Mine would say, “Chocolate chip cookies are better than macarons.”

We’ve seen the beginnings of this trend in the U.S. with 3D-printed latte art at places like Milk Street Cafe, in Boston, but it will only get more intense as 3D printing becomes easier. Here’s hoping we get a FabCafe in the States soon.

Eat My Face: I Made a 3D-Printed Candy Selfie at Dylan’s Candy Bar

This series explores the world of 3D printing through the most navel-gazing image possible: the selfie.

I thought it was going to be three-dimensional. I guess technically the gummy candy squirting out of the printer at Dylan’s Candy Bar on the Upper East Side was raised, but I’d imagined a Haribo-like gummy version of my face (like those gummy bears or frogs, or even Coke bottles), with a raised bump for a nose and lots of texture to stand in for my curly hair. This was more like lots of random squiggles painted on a flat card, with lots of white space in between.

Of course, the Beyoncé print was pretty awesome, squiggles and white lines be damned.

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After all, it’s made of candy, and everyone loves candy! Think somewhere between fruit leather and a fruit rollup, all vegan, all-natural, gluten-free, and gelatin-free, of course.

Called the Magic Candy Factory, the machine, which is made by Katje’s and looks like a MakerBot FDM/FFF printer, is pretty easy to use and pretty cool to watch.

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After you pick your design from a tablet (either a shape already in the system or a photo that you upload), a trained Dylan’s employee does some sort of magic on the tablet (thickening lines on the image, adjusting contrast), inserts a syringe of warmed gummy candy (your choice of flavor!) into the printer, and lets it get to work. The employee decides how many layers the image needs: My elephant needed many, but my selfie only needed one. Then they manually clean up the lines with a long toothpick-looking thing and spray magic glitter, sour dust, or fuzzy dust on top. (Carlos, the Dylan’s Candy Bar staffer helping me, aka the best person ever, said he likes to wear the glitter in his hair and go for a run because it makes him feel like a unicorn.)

Each print costs $15, which might seem steep until you consider that Carlos (or another employee) spends about 30 minutes with each person, walking them through the process, taste-testing magnificent mango versus elegant elderberry, and generally explaining how the machine works. Rendering for a new print takes about 15 minutes but only 3 to 5 minutes to actually print.

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So what’s the most popular shape? Carlos likes the elephant, and he says that most kids choose animals or other 3D shapes. The adults, though? Selfies, all the way. Damn. I guess I really am an adult.