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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Natural Machines

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:

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.

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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:

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

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.