The Great Foodini on BBC Click
The kitchen must be the single most gadget filled room in a household. Since the dawn of humanity we’ve been looking for ways to make cooking in the home even simpler, whether that be a caveman sharpening a stone so as he can cut the mammoth meat or the new automatic can opener we bought my grandmother.
The latest gadget, that one Barcelona-based company want you to have in your home, is a 3D Printer. Not a 3d printer that spits out thermoplastics but one that puts out layers of ingredients for fresh, edible food.
Natural Machines have created the Foodini in the hope that it will improve the nutritional value of meals made with relatively little effort. Natural Machines aren’t claiming that their machine is a Star-Trek replicator; that it will instantly make hearty meals but they are trying to automate the more time consuming processes of preparing nutritious meals.
Lynette Kucsma told the Smithsonian Magazine: “Its function is more like food assembly, so it’s important to not confuse what it does with actual cooking, It’s probably most ideal for deserts or dishes with a meat or cheese paste, like ravioli. But even then it can be useful with many different kinds of food.”
Essentially their machine is a RepRap with a squeezy-bottle; we’ve seen something similar with the PancakeBot but the Foodini will use up to six ingredient capsules all with their own relevant rates of pressure and temperatures. The printer is also encased in a heated chamber to keep those foodstuffs at their correct temperature.
So what can you make? For starters (boom-tish) the Foodini can lay out breadsticks, then moving onto a veggie burger, with which it prints both the bun and the bean patty, why not print whole ravioli parcels while you’re at it too?
Natural Machines are hoping to get FDA approval in the coming months and for their machine to be dishing out meals by next year. Stay tuned.
