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.