3D Print Meat With Your Imagine 3D Printer

We spoke with Essential Dynamics Sales Manager, Stevie Green regarding their new personal 3D printer, the Imagine 3D Printer. As we reported earlier, this printer is unique among ready-to-go assembled personal 3D printers as it uses syringes instead of the more common hot plastic extruders. This means it is capable of printing room-temperature gooey substances, including food! 

  

Fabbaloo: Is the device actually available for purchase today? 

 

Stevie Green: Yes. We have not gone all out, in marketing our product, only because we've had a large pre-order list that we are working through, right now. Thus, any overt marketing only tests our production limits. We are working around the clock to fix both these situations.

  

Fabbaloo: What examples of food printing have you managed to do with it?  

 

Stevie Green: We have used all meats (chicken, fish, turkey, beef, pork) that have been brought to a soluble state in a blender and then printed into customized shapes. Some of the more extravagant ones have been star shaped sushi's.  Until Imagine, sushi only came in two shapes, oblong and circular.  We have completely redefined these shape.  From now on, sushi will no longer come in only 2 shapes.  It will come in any shape you desire.

 

Since Imagine is a dual syringe system this opens up the opportunity to do fusion foods like never before. You can make salmon shots infused with red wine. This is the ultimate health food. All your omegas, vitamins, and resveratrol, all rolled up into one awesome shot!! New and healthy combinations, new fusions, unusual shapes, it is going to be an explosion of creativity. 

  

Our community website, Mongasso.com, (currently in Beta) is going to be the new center for this creative designing. Here you can engage in creating your own designs, sharing designs, collaborating with others in designing, getting others to design for you. It is the home for all forms of expressions of creativity. By creating a free account on Mongasso, users will have access to the whole world and the talents of people from around the world. 

Fabbaloo: What software is used to prepare food models? Is it the same approach as used for plastic 3D printing, or are there other considerations and software?   

 

Stevie Green: Food models are prepped in the same manner as any other cad file.  We use Google Sketchup.

  

Fabbaloo: How do you handle the foodsafe aspects?  

 

Stevie Green: There are actually only two points on the machine that come in contact with food: The syringes and the build tray. We use a food safe build tray and the syringes, we currently discard after usage. We will be providing washable glass syringes shortly.

  

Fabbaloo: What are your plans for the future? 

 

Stevie Green: Our future consists of many phases but primarily to get people acclimated to the technology.  We want to open up their minds as to the possibilities.  What excites us the most, is what creative things people will make with Imagine.  Once you can Imagine, you can redefine your world.   

 

For more information, check out the USD$2,995 Imagine 3D Printer at their site below. 

 

Via Essential Dynamics

The Imagine 3D Food Printer

There's not a lot of information about this intriguing device, but New York-based Essential Dynamics has released their "Imagine 3D Printer". Now we know you've seen a plethora of personal 3D printers explode onto the market in recent months, but this one is different. Very different. 

 

It doesn't print plastic. 

 

The Imagine uses syringes instead of hot extruders melting plastic. 

 

What can you extrude? Their answer: "If it extrudes, it prints". You can print any gooey substance and that means only one thing: Food! Yes, you should be able to print in Peanut Butter, Chocolate, Cookie Dough, Mashed Potatoes or possibly even Minced Turkey. Two syringes are included so theoretically you can print in two "foods", permitting a wide variety of interesting food experiments. 

 

As far as we know, this could be the first dedicated personal 3D food printer available. You can pick one up fully assembled for USD$2,995. 

 

Via Essential Dynamics

The RepRap Food

Among the numerous successful and unsuccessful 3D printer kits seeking funding on IndieGoGo and Kickstarter is a rather unusual project: The RepRap Food Printer. 

 

The project goals are to develop a rudimentary food printer based on the trusted RepRap platform. While many food printing experiments have taken place on previous RepRaps and you can even purchase a food extruder attachment from MakerBot, this project will "create a 3D printer which is solely to create edibles." This is unprecedented, as far as we know. 

 

What will make this device a dedicated food printer? How about these features:

 

• Agitator for stirring the print media
• Heated bed for "basic cooking functions"
• Ability to extrude food substances

 

We're hoping project leader Jordan Fry will include some food safe features as well, not the least of which is cleanability. He's seeking USD$2300 to develop the design by February 2nd. For a USD$199 contribution you'll be able to purchase the parts for the food printer at cost when the project completes. 

 

We're also hoping this project survives, since the single most asked question about 3D printing we encounter is "can I print food". Let's make it happen!

 

Via IndieGoGo

The Hamburger Shoe

People always get excited about 3D printed food in spite of the fact there are precious few ways to do so. While we await the development of a consumer food printer, others continue to experiment. Shapeways reports on a great experiment in which their member Tristan Bethe 3D scanned his shoe, 3D printed a slightly smaller model of it, formed food-safe silicon around it to form a food mold. 

 

He then simply poured in semi-fluid bread dough and baked himself a shoe. Adding a sole-shaped meat patty completed the "shoe burger".

 

Not exactly 3D printed food, but that's about as close as you can easily get these days. However, a commenter pointed out that the 3D printing step was overkill, as you could simply sacrifice a shoe by hardening it and using the shoe itself to form the silicon mold. 

 

We really need an inexpensive food printer. 

 

Via Shapeways

3D Printed Chocolate That Tastes Good

BBC news reports today on scientists at the University of Exeter in the UK who have developed a new chocolate 3D printer. Instead of extruding tasteless plastic, this printer is capable of extruding liquified chocolate into solid - and edible - objects. The process is similar to other extrusion-based 3D printers: squirt and solidify each layer in succession, gradually building up a complete object. Or food item in this case. 

 

We've seen attempts at chocolate printing before, but mainly they were experiments that simply proved it could be accomplished mechanically. However, as kitchen chefs all know, cooking is more than just tossing ingredients together. The best food comes from careful attention to fresh ingredients, sequencing and temperature control. That's what seems to be the focus of this new chocolate experiment, where researchers wish to find the right way to make the food actually taste good. On the other hand, we think any chocolate is good chocolate!

 

Interestingly, they're also working on a "consumer friendly interface" for people to design their own chocolate objects. 

 

Informal discussions we have with the public about 3D printing invariably drift over to the topic of "food printing". It seems that people have an extremely strong interest in printing food, while the 3D printer manufacturers consistently avoid this capability, instead focusing on industrial or personal manufacturing uses.

 

The first food printers will likely be similar to this experiment, using chocolate and similar feed (food?) material. They'll probably first appear in expensive kitchens to prepare unique desserts or cake toppers for weddings, etc. Eventually if the price comes down and sufficient ecosystem appears, we may see these things show up in kitchens across the land. 

 

Meanwhile, we'll settle for a chocolate bar. 

 

Via BBC and The University of Exeter

Image Credit: David Martin, EPSRC

Eat Your Face?

Easter is the time when many people eat massive quantities of chocolate, often in the shape of "bunnies". But what about other representations? MIT researcher David Carr has developed this thought by creating a CNC-like machine that scans your face and carves it into a chunk of chocolate. A chocolate face-printer. 

 

It seems rather straightforward: you assume the position in the hole and a fixed scanner observes the contours of your mug. Then these contours are reflected identically (scaled) onto a cutter traversing the chocolate. It looks very much like getting a duplicate key cut. Except it's your face. 

 

And that's the problem. Evidently Carr discovered that while people freely eat bunnies, few seem interested in eating their own face. Perhaps people want to preserve the novelty of the item. Or maybe it's just a little too close to cannibalism. 

 

So, um, what are you printing for lunch? 

 

Via Wall St Daily

3D Food Printing on CNN

We've just been informed that CNN has a piece focused on 3D food printing. Reporter Laurie Segall interviews French Culinary Institute Chef David Arnold, who's been experimenting with a Fab@Home printer, specially modified for printing food items. Not yet any food ingredients, but "any form of paste" as Arnold explains. Arnold says they've experimented with cake frosting, icing, cookie dough, masa (tortilla flour mix). Arnold says:

 

Anything that requires a high level of precision that people don't usually have with their hands in terms of making icing or decorations, this thing can perform amazingly well and have good repetition for small runs, like in your house. 

 

Also interviewed was Jamil Yosefzai, founder of Essential Systems, who apparently are commercializing this device based on Fab@Home development. They want to bring the 3D Food Printer to market for USD$1000 and eventually lower the price to only USD$700. We're going to start tracking this - this will be a very hot seller if they can manage to produce a reliable and usable device with an appropriate ecosystem to match.  

 

Jeffrey Lipton, lead of the Fab@Home project also appears. Lipton has been working on food printing concepts for some time now in conjunction with professional chefs, and now it has sufficiently progressed to be shown to the world. He says:

 

It allows you to inject skill into the process. I may not be the best frosting maker in the world, but with a 3D (food) printer I can lay my food down and get beautiful artwork out.

  

This is because, of course, a 3D food model is driving the "food preparation" stage - putting a previously manual operation under precise mechanical control. Complex 3D food designs could theoretically be prepared by anyone with this type of device, so long as they have the recipe (3D food model) and the right ingredients. 

   

The concept is breathtaking; food becomes art. Want!

 

Via CNN and Essential Dynamics

3D Printed Food Futures

We've been thinking some more about 3D printed food after yesterday's post, and wondered what the future might look like if reasonably capable food printers really existed. Here's some thoughts:

 

• If they were low cost, we'd find them in most kitchens and restaurants. Why not? People pay huge sums for fancy ovens and other kitchen appliances; a food printer could become as common as a microwave oven or rice cooker.
• Food printers could, theoretically, print identical "results", erm, "food dishes you can eat", if they had access to the same raw materials and 3D food designs. 
• This means that restaurants and home kitchens could produce amazing food items, so long as they had the right designs and feedstocks (foodstocks?)
• While access to raw material foodstocks is probably a commodity business, food designs won't be. They will be carefully crafted works of art - that you can eat!
• Chef training may include 3D CAD skills to ensure students can produce suitable designs. 
• We suspect competition will erupt in food design, with proprietary and open source food recipes, perhaps with "Food Labels" signing promising food designers to their group.
• Online services will sell access to the most popular food designs, perhaps leading to weekly "top ten lists", just like other digital media. There may even be celebrity "Rock Star 3D chef designers" and their fans, who eagerly await their next release.  

 

Could 3D Food be one of the biggest industries in the 21st century?