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:
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