Exciting news: playing with your food is no longer just relegated to children. Adults have the option now too, with the recent innovations in food technology. According to a recent CNN article, the 3D printing trend has been extended to the food industry with a new type of 3D printer that uses 3D printing technology to print food.
It’s called the “Foodini” and if there was any gadget that could push people to experiment more with their food, it’s this one. Like regular 3D printers that heat up plastic until it’s melted and then squeeze them out into a design, the Foodini squeezes out edible ingredients into pre-designed shapes from a steel capsule. Basically, a tiny oven-sized food manufacturing plant.
This is exciting for a lot of reasons. On the one hand, this could help smaller food manufacturers test new food concepts and products in a much more affordable and efficient way, essentially giving the little guys more of a fighting chance against larger food manufacturing companies. Digital technology has been lowering the barrier to entry for a wide variety of startups, and it was inevitable that technology like this would do the same for the food manufacturing industry.
But it’s not something that will just be part of commercial kitchens in the future. There’s a huge market for 3D printed food at home. Think about it – printing healthy snacks for your kids’ lunch box or printing a batch of hors d’oeuvres for a dinner party. You could even get really creative and use it to make mealtime more fun by printing images in sauce or other ingredients. It could change the way we introduce kids to new foods.
The technology is still in its infancy, but the idea is that at some point in the future (hopefully near future!) entire meals can be programmed into the printer and voila! dinner is served. Just like they did on the Jetsons. And to that end, Foodini has already partnered with a food manufacturer to create pre-packaged capsules that can be easily loaded and printed without a lot of fuss and prep.
The only downside is that it currently only prints the food – everything that comes out of the Foodini still has to be cooked. There are future versions being planned that will have the ability to cook the food, which will make the entire setup even more viable for use at home.
It looks like the future of food is here, and it’s exciting. Pretty soon, we’ll all be able to create our own culinary concoctions and print them out to eat whenever we feel like it. And it’ll be interesting to see how this affects the restaurant industry, and even mealtime at home. Imagine if food delivery was through the web with a recipe sent from the restaurant computer servers to an internet connected food printer in your kitchen. A burger from your favorite burger joint being printed right there in front of your eyes?
Or imagine being served food from a world famous chef, your favorite food blogger or TV chef from any where in the world. It could be printed for your pleasure, from them to you, through a food printer.
Currently, there are gaps between the food images or recipes we see on the net or the television and how we experience them, if we experience them at all. Unless we make the effort to recreate the recipe, it is unlikely that we will actually experience it. And our efforts do not always look like the picture. Plus, how do we know what the chef, cook or blogger intended for it to taste like? These gaps could be closed with this new technology. With very little effort, a food printer could bring those recipes to life to the exact specs of a chef, cook or blogger. All those food tv recipes could just be printed and not on a recipe card but on a plate for eating. At some point, will 3D printed food actually erase the need for home kitchens?
What do you think? Would you use a 3D food printer? What uses would you have for it? Let us know in the comments!
