Hungry? Let's print lunch

Using 3D printing, your food could be tailored to your metabolism

SAN JOSE -- Pablos Holman sees a day not too far off when our diets will be tailored to our metabolisms, adding a few bits of broccoli, a smattering of beets and some meat -- all extruded from a 3D printer in an appetizing form to please our palates.



Printed cake
The design on the cake was made with a printer.




While Reichentall focuses on desserts, Holman is busy with main courses, creating machines that can take freeze-dried food and hydrate it as it is being extruded through nozzles to create an eye-pleasing meal.

The 3D food printing technology won't be Intellectual Ventures' first foray into food preparation. The lab was the proving ground for the best-selling cookbook Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking, which put a technologist's spin on contemporary cooking.

Sugar cubes
Edible cube confections in the form of a 3D symbol.

The lab used ultra-high-pressure homogenizers, freeze-dryers, centrifuges, rotary evaporators and ultrasonic baths to determine how food reacted at the molecular level to cooking.


Holman said his efforts are "at the dot matrix stage," referring to the printer technology of the early 1980s. "I can print out smoothies and Cliff Bars," he noted.

One important reason to turn to 3D printed foods is to address the wildly inefficient way that developed countries, especially the U.S., handle the food they produce, said Holman.

For example, most Americans drive to a store to buy groceries and then store their food in cupboards, refrigerators and freezers -- but then most consumers end up throwing out about 40% of the food they buy.

Moreover, "every grocery store throws out 2,000 pounds of expired food a week," Holman said. "We're good at figuring out how to make enough food and make it efficiently. Where we're not efficient is in the last mile between the store and your mouth.

"So now, I'm imagining, what if I had a machine with three buttons on it: 'What I ate yesterday,' 'what Beyoncé likes' and 'I'm feeling lucky,'" Holman said.


3D food printing system could also offer a method of tracking with pinpoint precision the effects any given food has on an individual. Because the amount of each food is measured precisely, the printer could record nutritional data, and a person's health in reaction to food could be studied over a lifetime.

Desert tray
Many forms of confections could be produced through 3D printing.

Printed food could even include your daily dose of medicine.

"This meal is customized for you. It avoids allergens and injects your pharmaceuticals," Holman said. "It knows about what you've eaten before. We've correlated your diet's health effects for the first time in history. It makes a meal that understands who you are."


This article, "Hungry? Let's Print Lunch," was originally published on


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