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The future of breakfast might just be a surprising one: 3D-printed food. While most of us are used to popping a slice of bread in the toaster or boiling an egg, imagine using a cartridge in a printer instead. In a matter of minutes, you’d have a freshly printed banana and flaxseed muffin on your plate. This intriguing concept is getting closer to reality for the average consumer, thanks to a new breed of 3D food printers. According to Hod Lipson, a professor of mechanical engineering at Columbia University, “Food printing may be the ‘killer app’ of 3D printing. It’s completely uncharted territory.”Lipson, who has been researching 3D printing for nearly two decades, initially focused on printing materials like plastics, metals, electronics, and biomaterials. His journey into 3D food printing emerged from his work on printing fully functional 3D robots. These robots were envisioned to “walk off the printer,” a complex feat requiring the printer to work with multiple materials simultaneously. While experimenting with multi-material printers, Lipson observed something intriguing in his lab. Students began using food as a test material, experimenting with ingredients like cookie dough, cheese, chocolate, and other everyday items in an engineering lab. What started as a playful endeavor soon sparked genuine excitement.

There are two primary approaches to 3D food printing. The first involves using powders bound together during printing with a liquid, such as water. The second, the approach favored by Lipson’s lab, employs extrusion-based printing. This method utilizes syringes to deposit gels or pastes according to a software-generated “recipe.” Lipson’s prototype includes an infrared cooking element that cooks specific parts of the printed product at designated times. The team experimented with various materials, ranging from conventional ones like eggs, flour, and cheese to more unconventional choices like pesto and jam. They even collaborated with a culinary school in New York to push the printer’s limits. While cream cheese proved easy to print, materials like polenta and beets presented engineering challenges due to their granular nature. Another challenge in 3D food printing is understanding how different foods will behave when combined. Mixing ingredients introduces complex behaviors, which need to be considered in the printing process. Determining when and how to cook each component during printing is vital. For instance, when printing a structure with salmon and mashed potatoes, each element requires different cooking times and temperatures. To address these challenges, the team is developing software that predicts the final product’s appearance after cooking. Lipson’s 3D food printer stands out because it can simultaneously handle multiple ingredients and cook them during printing. He envisions two main applications for consumers: specialty cooking appliances that can create intricate dishes designed by experts worldwide, and personalized nutrition based on individual health metrics.

While Lipson doesn’t foresee 3D food printing replacing traditional cooking methods, he believes it will revolutionize the kitchen. “Cooking is one of the things that hasn’t changed for eternity. We still cook over an open flame like cavemen. The software has permeated almost every aspect of our lives except cooking. The moment software enters any field, it takes off and usually transforms it. I think that food printing is one of the ways software is going to enter our kitchen.”

Emily Matchar. Innovation Correspondent. 3D Print Your Breakfast.