Will food 3D printing ever work?
That’s a question that’s been in the air for as long as I’ve been involved in the technology, now 18 years.
The concept is straightforward: use a paste extruder and multiple materials to produce food dishes automatically. The long term vision would be to refine the technology enough to allow every kitchen to have a device that could produce a meal on demand, much like the Star Trek replicator would pop out burgers on a tray for the Enterprise crew.
But it’s been nearly two decades and this still hasn’t happened. It isn’t even close.
That is not due to lack of trying. There have been countless experiments with food 3D printing technology over the years. There have been multiple chocolate 3D printers on the market, for example. Researchers have experimented with food paste extruders constantly.
In fact, I see two stories this past week as evidence of continuing work in the area:
- Columbia engineers 3D print a three-course meal with hyperrealistic texture
- Italy crafts lab-grown snacks with fruit residues, plant cells and a 3D printer
These projects appear constantly, but none have unlocked the secret way to properly commercialize food 3D printing.
What is the problem? What’s stopping this from proceeding? It turns out there are several key barriers. Let’s take a look at them.
Food 3D Printing is Slow
Like most 3D printers, the production of a part (or food dish, in this case), is very slow. A plastic part might take an hour to 3D print, but so can a food dish. Now consider that you need five of them to feed the crew at lunch and you will see the problem. The Star Trek replicator was near-instant, but no one wants to wait five hours for lunch.
Food 3D Printing Ingredient Constraints
Some food printing experiments would use a paste extruder to produce a blob of food for cooking. But that’s only a single ingredient. Most food dishes are composed of multiple ingredients, and therefore food 3D printers must be able to handle multiple (and changing) ingredients. This makes them far more complex and expensive.
Food Preparation Must be Safe
Food safety is a regulated process, and unlike most 3D printers, a food 3D printer would have to ensure all products made by it are not only edible, but completely safe. This means the design of the machine and the materials its made from are safe.
What Food Dishes Do You Print?
We can find tens of millions of plastic part designs online, making access to content easily. There are dozens of 3D model creation tools, including both CAD and the more recent AI generation tools. But there are none that focus on food dishes, mainly because there is no widely accepted technology for printing food. There are no profiles, standards or other digital necessities that one would require to establish a thriving online marketplace for food dish designs.
Printed Food Quality
To speed up food printing, paste extruders typically have fairly wide diameters. This means that the “resolution” of food prints is quite coarse. However, this also means the food prints can be less attractive to the eye, which is a big part of food enjoyment. If you were shown two dishes and not told that one was 3D printed, you would almost certainly not be pleased with its appearance.
It’s Too Hard
If you were to see an example of a 3D printed dish, the immediate response is this: “I could make this myself in 15 minutes, and probably with better quality.” In other words, printed food dishes, even with as much variety of ingredients as technically possible, are simply not much different than a human cook could produce. There is no inherent advantage to a 3D printed food dish over a chef-prepared dish. This is quite unlike, say, aerospace parts, which can be lightweighted by 3D printing.
Where Could You Print Food?
Because of all of the above we are nowhere near seeing a practical and widely adopted kitchen 3D printer anytime soon.
That said, there are some niche areas that might see a possible advantage to a properly outfitted food 3D printer.
Any scenario where large amounts of identical food products are mass produced could be a potential application. This eliminates the speed problem, because throughput is the goal: print the food items in advance. These might include:
- Sports stadiums, where tens of thousands of attendees need food products
- Package food manufacturers, where food products are repeatedly produced
The catch is that in both of these cases there are mass production systems in existence to produce the food products at low per-unit costs. A food 3D printer simply can’t beat that price level.
It seems that we’re still a very long way from a true food 3D printer, and that will be the case until all of the problems above are solved.
