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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

food printing

Make Bread Great Again: Talking Bread Puts Branding (and Trump) on Loaves

Ever wanted an inspirational saying, company logo or the face of Donald Trump on a loaf of bread?

Ok, probably not, but if you do I have good news for you: Israel startup Talking Bread has created a machine to do just that.

The company’s bread “brander” burns an image on bread using the essentially the same technique with which livestock would be marked using a branding iron, only instead of branding cows, the machine stamps logos, pictures of Trump and Kim Jong Un and basically anything you could want on thousands of loaves of bread an hour.

I caught up with the company CEO Gilad Cohen at Seeds&Chips this week where he told me about his company’s products and the why he thinks stamping messages on baked goods is a white space (and bread) opportunity.

“I thought bread can be much more than food,” said Cohen. “If you eat the food and a minute later you forget what you ate, it doesn’t really matter.  But now we can change the way you look at bread.”

In one sense, Talking Bread is similar to Ripple and Selffee in that much like these companies, the Israeli startup sees food as a messaging and marketing platform. However, unlike these products -- both of which are for the lower-volume capacity of restaurants and events -- Talking Bread is built for the factory floor. The company’s first product, the Bread Wizard 9000 (yes, that’s its (awesome) name), can stamp up to 18 thousand loaves per hour, while the just-introduced Bread Wizard 5000 is for smaller bread production facilities with a capacity of a few thousand loaves per hour.

You can check out my interview with Gilad Cohen below, and when  you’re done with that, you can see the Bread Wizard 5000 here.

Talking Bread @ Seeds & Chips 2019

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.

Eat My Face! How One Entrepreneur Found Meaning By Printing Faces On Cookies

A few years ago, David Weiss went through a bout of career self-reflection.

He was working as a sales rep for a sweater wholesaler in New York City and found the work unfulfilling. So eventually, he did what so many of us dream of doing when a period of career stagnation comes along: he quit and travelled the world.

“I had a year’s salary in the bank, so I said, ‘I’m outta here,'” he told me in a phone interview.

And he was. Over the next year and a half, Weiss spent time in Israel, Indonesia and Thailand, and it was this last country where he would find the ticket for what would be his next journey.

Weiss was at a three-day silent meditation retreat in northern Thailand when he met his future business partner, a chiropractor named Farsh Kanji. Like Weiss, Kanji had cashed out of his former business and was traveling the world. Eventually they found each other and, luckily for both, their meditation wasn’t exactly silent.

Instead, they started talking about an idea that would become the focus of their future company: printing faces on food.

Real-Time Face Printing

Weiss and Kanji knew that the technology to print photos on food already existed. For example, there were already online services that could print your loved one on a cake and have it sent to your house in a few days. What they wanted to do is take this idea further by letting people snap pictures and print their image on food at events in real time.

From there, it wasn’t long before they got down to business.  First thing they knew they had to do was to figure out the technology to actually print on food.

The technology can also print on drinks

“We had some friends who understood printing technology,” said Weiss. To work with food, they explored modifying an ink printer and printing with food coloring.

It worked and Selffee was born. Before long, they were taking the tech to events.  But in those early days, they still had to work out the kinks. At one event, they were excited to print a cookie for one of Instagram’s early executives, only to have the picture print his face in the wrong colors and too big to fit on the cookie.

They’d eventually fine-tune the process, and nowadays can print on thousands of cookies, drinks or even marshmallows at a single event. For a typical engagement, Weiss says they’ll bring three printers and can batch-print 18 or so cookies in about five minutes. For bigger events, they’ve figured out how to queue logistics and can print thousands of face-printed edibles.

The company has been able to keep marketing costs low because the product often goes viral on social media

“We did the Super Bowl and did about 60,000 faces on marshmallows” said Weiss.

So far in 2018, Selffee has worked over 200 events. According to Weiss, they’ve worked a total of 350 cumulatively their start in 2016. The company also has seven full time employees and has plans to expand globally in 2019 by moving into five markets in Europe.

“From two guys just hacking away, it’s now a successful project that’s my personal ikigai,” said Weiss.

He asked me if I knew what that meant. When I said no, he explained the Japanese term that basically describes a person finding their life’s calling by providing the world something it needs.

While I’ll have to take Weiss’s word on the inner peace he feels, one thing I can say with certainty is he nailed one part of the ikigai equation: the world definitely needed more edible faces on cookies.

If you’d like your face printed on a cookie, come see Selffee and 40 other startups at The Spoon’s FoodTech Live event in Las Vegas during CES on January 8th.