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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

BeeHex

Kroger Begins Testing Cake Printing Robot From Beehex at Location in Ohio

Late last month, grocery giant Kroger began to trial the use of a cake-printing robot made by Beehex in the Gahanna, Ohio, location, The Spoon has learned.

The new Cake Writer machine, which will allow consumers to input a custom message and watch as the cake is decorated in minutes on the spot, is made by 3D food printing startup Beehex. Depending on the message, the decoration process will take two to fourteen minutes. The machines will be loaded with hundreds of different pre-made designs and fonts for the customer to choose from.

Beehex CEO Anjan Contractor told The Spoon that the startup plans to install 10 Beehex Cake Writer machines in the Columbus market next year and has plans to install up to 350 machines in the future with Kroger.

Contractor says that a typical machine costs roughly $10 thousand when produced at scale, and the ongoing costs include $50 a month for cloud database management and about $5-6 for each 20 oz cartridge of frosting.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shorts/yNbBofgCp4s?feature=share

I don’t know about you, but I would gladly pay for a customized cake. We just celebrated a birthday in our family, and I had to buy a tube of frosting and scrawl the name on the top of the cake with my atrophied handwriting. A customized image with legible writing is something I’d pay for.

You can check out the Cake Writer in action below in the video provided by Beehex.

Fruit Cells, Space Bread, and Cultured Meat Cartridges: Deep Space Food Challenge Announces Phase 1 Winners

On planet Earth, we face the challenge of feeding a rapidly growing population that is set to reach 9.7 billion people by 2050. In space, we face the challenge of feeding astronauts traveling through the galaxy for an extended period of time. Novel and innovative food technology could offer viable solutions in both realms.

For the first time ever, NASA and CSA (Canadian Space Agency) have come together this year to host the Deep Space Food Challenge. Companies competing in the challenge must be able to offer a solution to feeding at least four astronauts on a three-year space mission. The solutions should be able to achieve the greatest amount of food output (that is palatable and nutritious) with minimal input and waste. In addition to being used in space, the solution must also improve food accessibility on Earth.

This week, the winners of Phase 1 were announced:

MANUFACTURED FOODS

  • Astra Gastronomy
  • Beehex
  • BigRedBites
  • Bistromathic
  • Cosmic Eats
  • SIRONA NOMs
  • Space Bread
  • µBites
  • ALSEC Alimentos Secos SAS
  • Electric Cow
  • Solar Foods

BIO CULTURE FOODS

  • Deep Space Entomoculture
  • Hefvin
  • Mission: Space Food
  • KEETA
  • Natufia x Edama

PLANT GROWTH

  • Far Out Foods
  • Interstellar Lab
  • Kernel Deltech
  • Nolux
  • Project MIDGE
  • RADICLE-X
  • Space Lab Cafe
  • AMBAR
  • Enigma of the Cosmos
  • JPWORKS SRL
  • LTCOP
  • Team π

Many companies that were selected as Phase 1 winners use technologies that have steadily gained popularity in the food tech space, like 3D printing, using bioreactors for cultured protein, and vertical farming. In-demand “future food” ingredients like fungi, microbes, cultured cells/meat, and insects were also popular amongst competitors.

Out of the 28 winners, here are some of our favorites:

Beehex (Columbus, Ohio) – Some of you may remember Beehex for their work on a 3D pizza printer for NASA. For this competition, Beehex is proposing a UFF (Universal Food Fabricator) which can dehydrate plants and cultured meats into powder form foods, store them into hermetically sealed cartridges for 5+ years, and 3D print with the stored food in cartridges when needed.

Deep Space Entomoculture (Somerville, Massachusetts) – In this company’s proposed food system, dry-preserved insect cells will be brought up into space. Using a suspension bioreactor, the insect cells, along with other ingredients, will be reactivated and used to create traditional meat-like analogs.

Space Bread (Hawthorne, Florida) – As the name aptly suggests, this company’s tech allows for crew members to create bread in space. This food system includes a multifuntional plastic bag that is used to store and combine ingredients, and then bake a roll.

Mission Space Food: This company is making a system that will cultivate meat in space using pluripotent stem cells using cell cryopreservation and bioreactor. The creators say the system can can grow beef as well as be adapted to grow other meats such as pork or lamb.

AMBAR – (Bucaramanga, Colombia) – Operating as a small-scale ecosystem, AMBAR’s growing cabinet contains different compartments for various plants. Within this system, both terrestrial and aquatic are able to be grown for food.

Hefvin (Bethesda, Maryland) – This company produces berries by growing fruit cells in a nutrient rich media. Spherification (the culinary process used to shape liquid into squishy spheres) is used to encase different cells to create a full berry, complete with skin and pulp.

Space Cow: (Germany) – this company makes a system converts CO2 and waste streams straight into food, with the help of a food grade micro-organisms and 3D printing.

Each U.S. winner of Phase 1 has been awarded $25,000 to continue working on their solution and is invited to continue on to the Phase 2 competition.

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 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

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.