Soon we will all walk into a weird, unstaffed restaurant called Casa Automa where robots will grill burgers and serve you perfectly-shaped marzipan treats and write your name on a frosted cake so delicate that you don’t want to eat it. After all, we are quickly entering a world of entry-level 3D food printers like the Bocusini.
The Bocusini won’t print you a burger. Instead, think of the printer as a sort of 3D plotter, allowing you to build objects in sugar and marzipan and draw on foods with absolute precision. The system is basically a simple 3D printer with a heated extrusion head that takes small cartridges of marzipan, chocolate, and fudge. You can print a few dozen little objects – buildings or sugar frogs – with each cartridge.
Again, this isn’t anything amazing and you’ve been able to do this with 3D printers for a while. However this one costs about $900 for early adopters and it offers an excellent opportunity to experiment in the space without spending too much up front.
The team is based in Freising, Germany and has already built working prototypes. They plan to ship the printer in January 2016 and they are also offering “hacker” kits that allow you to retrofit other 3D printers into food makers. In short it’s a fun little product that could make your pastry chef happy as she merrily prints interlocking sugar monkeys for your Curious George-themed Brunch.
Or you can just train your printer to make a perfect ice cream cone and be done with it.
Source: techcrunch.com