What if We Could Print Our Meal?

Direct food printing is when we can print our food directly and retain our branding into our customers mind at the last moment till it swallowed.

Direct food printing is possible with the advancement of Nano technology and 3D printing.

For example - if we want to print pieces of bread, all we need to do is print the dough and add yeast is a pre-defined array and let the microbe do the magic!

There are so many questions that come in mind like what would be the technology for printing, Material of printing and process of printing etc.

Perfect material for printing may be “Nutella” (As per Luis Fraguada). 

Principal of printing is same - fused deposition modeling technology that’s commonly used to print plastics:

Pre-processing: Build-preparation software slices and positions a 3D CAD file and calculates a path to extrude plastic and any necessary support material.

Production: The 3D printer heats the plastic to a semi-liquid state and deposits it in ultra-fine beads along the extrusion path. Where support or buffering is needed, the 3D printer deposits a removable material that acts as scaffolding.

Post-processing: The user breaks away support material away or dissolves it in detergent and water, and the part is ready to use.

Same as FDM technology food is extruded through a nozzle and built up in layers to the specified design.

Once the item has been completed it would then have to be baked, boiled or fried before eating.

The nature of the technology means the printer is limited to creating customized 3D shapes out of soft or puréed foodstuffs such as mascarpone, guacamole or chocolate spread; Fraguada (Luis Fraguada, research director at architecture studio Built By Associative Data) soon discovered that "Nutella is the perfect material for printing".