Review of 3D Food Printing
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Davide Sher - Xavier Tutó Review of 3D food printing City Review of 3D Food Printing Cooking This article will discuss how the sci-fi vision of the series, Creativity Star Trek in which a food replicator aboard a Federation spaceship Culture Bioprinting materialises elements such as tomato soup, tea or coffee (as well Decoding as alien foods) out of thin air, as if by magic, may become a real Food Design machine in the not too distant future. On the one hand, the 3D Environment Food designing printing industrial revolution, which is currently changing how new products are designed, developed, produced, marketed and Printed food consumed, has also reached the world of cooking. Technology Food product Food safety Health Intelligent labels Method Packaging Davide Sher Xavier Tutó Introduction an object’s shape by removing excess raw materials, Process While the crew on board the science-fictional space- they only take the necessary matter in the form of Products ship Enterprise had access to a replicator, a machine liquid, powder or filament, which the machine then capable of assembling atoms of matter to create any melts or solidifies to create the object’s final shape. Project “A company called Modern object that could possibly exist in the universe, for This process holds great promise for manufacturing Proteins Meadow applies the latest some unknown reason they used it primarily to pre- as it drastically alters all supply chain dynamics, pare hot tea or other alien beverages. From its initial removing the need for economies of scale and po- Refuse advances in tissue engineering conception in Star Trek it was thus obvious that if tentially reducing time, cost, energy consumption Senses to the development of novel humanity had access to a machine that could cre- and transportation requirements. With 3D print- Society ate anything, it would chiefly be used to make food. ing, even highly complex objects are assembled by biomaterials to address Since 3D printers can be considered the descendants a machine following the instructions contained in Sociocultural of the Star Trek replicator, it seems simply and ‘Vul- a digital 3D model, designed using CAD software. Strategy some of these pressing canly’ logical that 3D food printers are a hot topic. Much like a replicator, 3D printers shape matter in 3D printers are robotic machines that create order to make objects. global challenges” objects through a process also known as additive There are many different technologies and vari- manufacturing. This means that instead of defining ants to 3D printing. Among the first to be invented Urban agriculture Davide Sher is a freelance journalist since 2005. He began his career in 2002 as editor for TIM, and over were stereo-lithography, where objects are created Urban design the years he has worked as a freelance contributor to thanks to the solidification of photoactive liquid many newspapers and magazines, focusing on science Urbanism resin, and binder jetting, where powdered materi- and technology. Since 2013 he is senior writer at 3dprintingindustry.com. als are glued together layer by layer. Today, the most Waste common and affordable process is called fused Waste of resources Xavier Tutó is a multidisciplinary designer, in 2004 deposition modelling (FDM) or fused filament fab- Tutó co-founded KXdesigners Studio with Katia R. Glossmann. In 2009, together with Jordi Bayer, he created Growthobjects, a group that develops design and 1 Schematic diagram of additive layer manufacturing. engineering solutions through additive manufacturing. Growthobjects. 105 31 ELISAVA Temes de disseny Davide Sher - Xavier Tutó Review of 3D Food Printing rication (FFF), in which a spool of thermoplastic levels known as laser—or heat—sintering. In laser Cornucopia Project, a complete digital gastronomy polymeric material is heated and extruded through sintering, the powdered materials (polymers or even solution, in 2010. The project included a family of a nozzle, in order to ‘draw’ the 3D layers that form metals) are bound together after being partially four food printer prototypes: the Digital Chocolatier, the object. An alternative process derived from FDM melted by a laser beam, while heat sintering uses the Digital Fabricator, the Robotic Chef and the Vir- uses a syringe to extrude paste-like materials, which either infrared radiation or a heated surface. The tuoso Mixer,2 which ranged from a machine capable do not need to be heated and are dense enough to CandyFab version of laser sintering, which would of assembling different ingredients to make choco- form layers and 3D structures once deposited. Both be followed by the 5000 and 6000 version in 2008 late-based sweets, to an actual multi-food 3D printer this FDM variant and binder jetting technologies and 2009, was referred to as SHASAM, an acronym (the Digital Fabricator), and a multi-arm robotic sys- have already been used for 3D printing with food. that stands for selective hot air sintering and melt- tem designed to transform foodstuffs physically and As in all other fields, before food was ever 3D ing. It used a focused heat source moving over a bed chemically thanks to a range of tools. printed, it was 2D printed. In 2005 Homaru Cantu, of sugar, fusing its particles together to create large The very first developments in industrial 3D print- a chef at Chicago’s Moto Restaurant,1 made the 3D sugar sculptures. ing technologies, binder jetting and stereolithography headlines by being the first to use regular ink-jet 2D Some of the most forward-looking projects, con- took place at the Massachusetts Institute of Technol- 1 Fab@Home Model 2 3D printer and printed parts. printing to design images on sushi rolls wrapped in sidered advanced even to this day, were those intro- ogy (MIT) and at 3D Systems, which in 1987 became Hod Lipson edible paper made of soybeans and cornflour. He duced when Marcelo Coelho and Jamie Zigelbaum the very first company to produce a commercially used organic, food-based inks of his own concoc- presented the prototypes and concept designs for the available 3D printer. During the nineties, MIT devel- oped a procedure it patented and trademarked with trusion printer to work with food. For this project the name 3D Printing, later officially abbreviated to they partnered with the French Culinary Institute 3DP. In February 2011 MIT began to grant licenses in Manhattan to print personalised chocolate and to six companies to use and promote the 3DP pro- cheese, biscuits, cubes of puréed turkey and celery cess in their products. The best known among them paste, and even tiny spaceships made of deep-fried is Zcorporation or Zcorp, which was acquired by its scallops. For the scallops the team went so far as to competitor 3D Systems in 2011.3 Its 3DP technology, blend the seafood and add transglutaminase (often now also known as jet printing or colour jet printing called meat glue) so that the mixture would solid- (CJP), is still among the most commonly used today ify again after having been extruded. For the cel- 1 Sushi roll and edible menu made with a 2D ink-jet printer. for non-functional full-colour objects. ery, they added agar and created a celery gel. The Chef Homaro Cantu, Moto Restaurant Many new advances in 3D printing technology food-printing craze is catching on in other research are still produced at universities before becoming settings as well, and chocolate has been one of the tion to draw the colourful images and photos, while commercial projects or companies. Food 3D print- main areas for experimentation. the technique he adopted was similar to other mul- ing is no different, for it is a highly relevant sector Three years later, in 2010, scientists at the Uni- ti-material and multicolour 2D printing processes, that welcomes studies from both academic and cor- versity of Exeter built their own 3D printer with a also defined as ink-jet processes. porative communities. heated extruder for printing gourmet chocolate. The next step towards the third dimension (that In 2007 Hod Lipson and Evan Malone at the They developed a new fabrication method known of height, or Z-axis) was taken by Windell Oskay Cornell University Computational Synthesis Lab- as chocolate additive layer manufacture (Choc- and Lenore Edman at Evil Mad Scientist Labora- oratory adapted the Fab@Home4 open-source ex- ALM).5 Led by Dr Liang Hao, the study explored tories with their CandyFab Project. In 2007 they introduced the CandyFab 4000, an early DIY 3D printer based on a modified version of another 3D 2 Hod Lipson, Melba Kurman, 'Digital Cuisine,' in Fabricated. 5 Liang Hao, Stephen Mellor, O. Seaman, J. Henderson, printing process commonly used today at industrial The New World of 3D Printing, Wiley, Indianapolis, 2013, Neil Sewell and M. Sloan, 'Material characterisation pp. 129-133. and process development for chocolate additive layer manufacturing,' Virtual and Physical Prototyping, 1745- 3 Stephanie Crawford, 'How 3-D Printing Works' [online], 2767, volume 5, issue 2 (2010), pp. 57-64. http://www. HowStuffWorks.com, 2011 [Accessed: 8 January 2015]. tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17452751003753212#. 1 David Bernstein, When the Sous-Chef Is an Inkjet [online], Available at: http://computer.howstuffworks.com/3-d- VK0nICuG98E The New York Times, New York. 2005. [Accessed: printing.htm 8 January 2015] Available at: http://www.nytimes. 4 Lauren K. Wolf, 'Personal Manufacturing' [online]. com/2005/02/03/technology/circuits/03chef.html 1 Manufacturing process with an experimental machine where the raw material is sugar. CandyFab 4000 by Evil Mad Scientist Chemical & Engineering News, American Chemical Society, 2011. [Accessed: 8 January 2015] Available Laboratories. at: http://cen.acs.org/articles/89/i46/Personal- Manufacturing.html 106 107 31 ELISAVA Temes de disseny Davide Sher - Xavier Tutó Review of 3D food printing that one day will be able to create foodstuffs that implemented and offered by MakerBot in 2010 as the do not yet exist.