3D Printed Food - Fascinating Tech Magazine Archivee
Main menu:
3D Printed Food
Archived Issues > Summer 2016 Issue
3D Food Printing Special by Garry
XYZ Printing are a firm favourite here at FascinatingTech having won two of our TrulyFascinating Awards with their affordable 3D printing solutions, so we were excited to be invited to a special event in london to look at the future of 3D Printing.
That future includes chocolate. Imagine being able to print any 3D Shape in chocolate, or pastry or even cream cheese. The XYZ 3D food printer does just that. Now when XYZ printing arranged their event in a kitchen without air conditioning I suspect they expected a typical english summer and not the abnormal heatwave we had. This counted out printing chocolate and showed one of the limitations of printing food.
Layers weren't quite setting before the next layer was being applied making the printing less than precise but this was definitely down to the weather and I saw examples of really clever biscuits printed in slightly cooler conditions
This technology is in early days but is still remarkable. XYZ do sell this product but not to consumers. It costs 1000 euros and has been a big hit with German bakers.
The way it works is to fill tubes with the printing material, be that chocolate, pastry or even cream cheese. The printer then uses the standard 3D printing extruding technique to layer up the 3D object. One impressive demo had cream cheese being printed on pre-cooked pancakes. It was clever how it worked out the height to print at automatically.
XYZ are constnatly evolving their products and you could see how they could add functionality to cook each layer as it is printed (perhaps they should also add cooling). As it is the layer printing does lead to a very light and unusual but pleasant texture to the biscuits they printed for us.
All in all this is technology to look forward to and with XYZPrintings reputation for developing affordable technology you could easilly see this appearing in Kitchens everywhere in a few years.
