Project Members: Jeffrey
Lipton
Past Members: Evan Malone. Dan Periard, Dan Cohen, Meredith Cutler,
Deborah Coulter







Bellow is an edited excerpt
from “Hydrocolloid Printing: A
Novel Platform for Customized Food Production”
More examples and Materials can be found on the Fab@Home Website
Impact
of Food SFF
Few
things are as natively intertwined with humanity as food, which is essential to
biological and social life. Not only does food support life and underpin social
relations, but it also accounts for a substantial part of our economy. As of
2008, Americans spent $1.02 trillion annually on food, i.e., 9.6% of the
nation’s combined disposable personal incomes. Solid Freeform Fabrication (SFF)
has the potential to leverage its core strengths (e.g., geometric complexity,
automated fabrication) and make its mark on the culinary realm by transforming
the way we produce and experience food. Technological
innovations are necessary, however, before these visions can be realized. In
addition to lowering barriers to SFF, such as cost of the machine, materials
must be developed to feasibly enable a wide range of foods to be produced on
SFF platforms.
Impact on Culinary
Professionals: Overview
Food-SFF would benefit the professional culinary
domain primarily in two respects: by lending new artistic capabilities to the
fine dining domain, and also by extending mass-customization capabilities to
the industrial culinary sector.
Impact on Culinary
Professionals: Fine Dining
Fine dining chefs are continually developing new,
innovative techniques and seeking the enabling technologies that will help them
push the boundaries of culinary art. They innovate by harnessing
non-traditional ingredients, such as hydrocolloids, and by employing new tools
pulled straight from the scientific community; the result is “culinary magic”
including flavored gelatin spheres with liquid centers, sauce foams, hot liquid
deserts with flash frozen shells, syringe-extrudable meats, and much more. SFF
promises to be the next important enabling technology in the fine dining realm.
SFF delivers new possibilities by lending this faction of culinary artists one
of SFF’s core capabilities: fabrication of multi-material objects with high
geometric complexity. As the barriers fall (e.g., SFF machine prices have
reduced nearly an order of magnitude in the last decade) and non-traditional
ingredients gain credibility in the fine dining world (e.g., hydrocolloids),
the question is not whether SFF will play an important role in the future of
food, but rather, in what ways will it do so. Examples of potential future
applications include cakes with complex, embedded 3D letters, such that upon
slicing the cake, a message is revealed. Or, even a prime rib with a hidden
message. Perhaps an on-demand, customizable menu in which the dish is prepared
in any 3D shape that the diner desires: the diner can co-create with the
culinary artist in real-time.
Impact on Culinary
Professionals: Industrial Production
The
second way in which SFF could benefit the professional culinary community is by
enabling mass-customization in the industrial culinary sector. Today,
industrial food producers rely heavily on high-throughput processes such as
molding, extrusion and die-cutting. These processes, however, are not amenable
to mass-customization (i.e., the use of flexible manufacturing techniques to
produce custom output in a low-unit-cost fashion). Molding, extrusion and
die-cutting each require substantial custom-tooling, and consequently,
producing custom output for low-quantity runs is simply unfeasible. This is
precisely where SFF’s inherent strengths can be leveraged: producing food with custom, complex geometries while
maintaining cost-effectiveness. The cost-effectiveness is enabled by the fact
that SFF does not require custom-tooling or extensive manual labor. One
potential future application is custom
production of edible giveaways, for example, as marketing collateral for
small corporate events. Currently, the cost of custom tooling prohibits
low-quantity custom production
runs, but with a flexible culinary production platform like SFF, such
production runs would be feasible.
Impact in the Home: Overview
Culinary
professionals are more primed to adopt SFF than are homeowners, however, the
implications for laypeople are even more profound. The effect on laypeople is
essentially twofold: increasing productivity and injecting knowledge.
Impact in the Home:
Productivity
Currently,
the average American spends more than 30 minutes per day preparing food,
according to USDA economists. If food-SFF were brought to the “set-and-forget”
state, requiring minimal human labor, the average person could possibly realize
time savings of 150+ hours per year (3.8 workweeks per year).
Impact in the Home:
Injecting Knowledge
The second way that food-SFF could impact laypeople
is by abstracting culinary knowledge and injecting it directly into the home.
The idea of abstracting knowledge is nothing new. When chefs create new dishes
and then write recipes, they are effectively abstracting their knowledge and
distilling it into a prescription for others to reproduce their work.
Nevertheless, just like the skills a musician needs to effectively play a song
from sheet music, a recipe follower still needs non-trivial skills to execute a
recipe. It is not only in the abstraction of knowledge, but also in the
execution of the prescription that SFF could have tremendous impact. Just as
MIDI software can offload musical skill by taking in digital sheet music and
directly creating sound, the SFF system could directly inject the skills
necessary to follow a recipe end-to-end. Laypeople don’t have to know the first
thing about musical notation, valve/key/fret fingering, or tonal theory to be
able to utilize a stereo system to deliver a distilled version of a live
musical performance directly into their home. Likewise, a layperson would not
necessarily need to possess even basic culinary skills to employ an SFF system
to create geometrically complex, multi-material food items. Culinary knowledge
and artistic skill of world renowned chefs can be abstracted to a 3D
fabrication file and then used by laypeople to reproduce famous chefs’ work in
the home. Also, expert knowledge of the world’s leading nutritionists can be
abstracted and encoded in 3D fabrication files to help laypeople eat more
healthily, without necessarily having to learn healthy cooking techniques or
even understand nutritional principles such as caloric intake and protein
balance. SFF systems could even go one step further, and deliver customized
solutions (SFF’s core strength) to each user that incorporate the
individualized nature of nutritional needs. For example, a layperson may soon
be able to upload a report of their daily activity from a pedometer and digital
food log, and the SFF system could use expert knowledge to print them a meal
that fulfills their particular nutritional needs for the day. While experts can
currently offer advice on how to balance a nutritional program, their influence
falls short of delivering the end-to-end solution that only SFF system can
provide: from personalized design through fabrication.
Conference Proceedings
Lipton, J.I., Arnold, D., Nigl, F., Lopez, N., Cohen, D.L., Noren, Nils., Lipson,H., (2010) "Multi-Material Food Printing with Complex Internal Structure Suitable for Conventional Post-Processing", 21st Solid Freeform Fabrication Symposium (SFF'10), Austin Tx, USA.
Cohen D.L., Lipton, J., Cutler, M.,
Coulter, D., Vesco, A., Lipson, H. (2009) “Hydrocolloid Printing: A Novel
Platform for Customized Food Production” Solid Freeform Fabrication
Symposium (SFF’09), Aug 3-5 2009, Austin, TX, USA.
Periard D., Schaal N., Schaal M.,
Malone E., Lipson H., (2007) “Printing Food”,
Proceedings of the 18th Solid Freeform Fabrication Symposium, Austin TX, Aug
2007, pp.564-574.