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3D food printing—An innovative way of mass customization in food fabrication

chocolate products with different shapes and sizes. air was applied to melt chocolate and force it out of
MIT Researchers used hot melt chocolate as a dis- the chambers. A “3D Food-Inks Printer” which dis-
pensing liquid and developed a functional prototype penses 3D color images on extruded base material may
named “digital chocolatier” to fabricate customized also fall into this category [29] , while a post-processing
chocolate candy [13,28] . In this research, the compressed step was applied to fuse the layers together.

Figure 2. (A) Selective hot air sintering and (B) Selective laser sintering
The advantages of food printer designed based on platform. Sugar Lab [31] used sugar and different flavor
FDM include compact size and low cost of mainten- binders to fabricate complex sculptural cakes for wed-
ance. However, shortcomings such as a seam line be- dings and other special events. This fabrication
tween layers, long fabrication time, and delamination adopted 3D Systems’ Color Jet Printing technology,
caused by temperature fluctuation, can be further im- and the material and fabrication process met all the
proved. requirements of food safety. Binder Jetting offers ad-
vantages such as faster fabrication, ability to build
complex structures, and low ingredients cost. But the
fabricated products suffer from rough surface finish
and high sugar content, and the machine cost is high.
Post-processing may be required, such as curing at
higher temperature to strengthen the bonding among
layers.
(4) Inkjet printing: As shown in Figure 5, inkjet food
printing dispenses multi-material streams/droplets
from a syringe-type multi-channel printhead in a
drop-on-demand way and creates 3D edible food
products such as cookies, cakes, or pastries. It involves

Figure 3. Hot-melt extrusion (FDM)
(3) Powder bed binder jetting: In standard binder jet-
ting technology, each powder layer is distributed
evenly across the fabrication platform, and liquid
binder sprays to bind two consecutive layers of powd-
er [30] . As shown in Figure 4, the powder material is
usually stabilized by spraying water mist to minimize
the disturbance caused by binder dispensing. In edible
3D printing project, Southerland et al. [22] utilized su-
gars and starch mixtures as a powder material and a Z
Corporation powder/binder 3D printer as a fabrication Figure 4. Powder bed binder jetting

32 International Journal of Bioprinting (2015)–Volume 1, Issue 1