A new fruit printer could inject some fun into your desserts, as well as some cream, if Dovetailed raises the £200,000 it needs to create the first 100 nufood units.
It can create specific shapes from pre-packaged liquids and raw ingredients. So the nufood printer is a step towards full 3D printed food, rather than the finished article that can create your dinner from a selection of raw protein, carbohydrate, fats and flavours.
Is this a novelty?
Instead this could be something of a novelty item that can recreate a strawberry shape and put the cream on the inside. It’s about creating the basic shapes, with ‘flavour bombs’ contained within sections of the structure.
This 3D printer contains flavoured gels inside a skin that is created by the process of spherification. Each flavoured gel essentially forms its own skin when sodium alginate connects with calcium chloride. It allows skilled chefs, or enthusiastic amateurs, to play with the senses. They could create a fried egg shape with mango and vanilla flavours, just as an example.
An orange-shaped raspberry could be a winner
Founder Vaiva Kalnikaite, a PhD graduate who has set up shop in Cambridge, told The Financial Times: “You can use raw ingredients to produce strawberries with cream in the middle. We don’t think that is as interesting as creating new shapes and tastes, like an orange made from raspberry juice.
“We have been thinking of making this for a while. Our 3D fruit printer will open up new possibilities not only to professional chefs and food companies but also to kitchens in our home. It allows us to enhance and expand our dining experiences. We have re-invented the concept of fresh food on demand.”
Celebrity chefs could love it
She’s pitching the first machines at Artisan chefs like Heston Blumenthal and high-end cocktail bars that need to make a visual impression. Foodies that like to experiment, food engineers if you will, could also have one of these upscale printers in their home.
Dovetailed has created a number of virtual reality systems to help architects and designers in construction, as well as assorted curiosities like a shopping basket that scans the foods as you shop and alerts the customer to problems like high sugar levels.
“Many companies focus on technology and hope that a great user experience will just happen,” she says. “What we do is talk to the people who will use the products or services to understand how they would interact with them on a day-to-day basis.”
Other products on the way
Kalnikaite isn’t solely focused on 3D printed food by any stretch of the imagination, then. The company is developing products to exploit the Internet of Things and wearable tech.
It clearly sees itself as a think-tank that is prepared to tackle the big issues and has even created a rather abstract hat that detects surveillance cameras as a behavioural experiment.
Dovetailed now has six employees, so it’s still a fledgling outfit that has an industrial designer, an engineer, a physicist and a chemist. This is a streamlined company that clearly has to outsource a substantial amount of the work while it focuses on the core issues.
This campaign could be crucial
The crowdfunding campaign could be a major step forward for the fledgling company and we hope this printer does well. It might be a niche item, but it’s a step closer to true 3D printed food and that just has to be a good thing.
We’ll let you know the crowdfunding details as we get them.
