February VLog

February VLog

My VLog for the month of February is about my recent findings of 3-D printing facts. This one is about 3-D printed food hitting shelves in hitting shelves in various countries! Wow. Hope you enjoy, whoever is watching.

3-D printing's Commercial Uses

3-D Printing and it's Commercial Uses: Softer, Easy-to-Chew Foods 

Because 3-D printing is only starting to be known by people and the printing abilities are vague and still need exploration, you never know what you are going to get, especially from my blogs. This blog post can be surprising to some people because of 3-D printing foods being in close contact with healthcare. Awesome.

In my early stages of research on 3-D printing, I was only looking up how 3-D printing works not the benefits of 3-D printing food for society and I'm sorry because my topic is how 3-D printing food could solve world famine problems.

It is known that not all people could eat some of the foods we do. And this blog is a close up of how 3-D printing food helped stop the elderly in some retirement homes from going hungry.

All of the early examples of 3-D printed foods such as the ones you see when looking them up on Google have all used simple, processed, single-ingredient pastes, powders and purees. Nobody is able to manufacture something complex as let's say a burger with all the fixings. Cobbling together all necessary ingredients and structures to make the food has been a bit too much of a challenge so far.

A researcher at the TNO or the Dutch Organization for Applied Scientific Research named Kjeld van Bommel realized this matter. So rather than reinventing an organic object, van Bommel says that they will create personalized novel consumable foods with personalized nutritional content.


To that end, his group at the TNO is researching 3-D printing food to help seniors who are suffering from dysphagia and have trouble chewing and swallowing food. Their meals are given to them. These people get their meals in an unsightly and unappealing mush of pureed chicken and broccoli for example leading to appetite loss and malnourishment. Van Bommel has a grant from the EU to develop 3-D printed replicas of those foods, only softer and easier to chew.

This concludes my blog. See you in a week or two. Bye for now.

Planning Out the 3-D Printing Food Process

Planning Out the 3-D Food Printing Process

So it is established that 3-D printed food exists and it tastes good, but what happens next with the printer having to manipulate the software for good taste? Let's figure that out.

3-D printing companies are all starting to get more famous each day, while the more well-known NASA are using 3-D technology to make simple meals for the astronauts, which make the food choices in the International Space Station have more variety. Instead of food being sent up 100000
kilometers in the sky, machines are starting to make food supplies less of a hassle for the astronauts.

But how is printing the all planned out? As in: "Hey, printer, cook so-and-so, with blah blah blah on the side, can you do that for me please?"

Simply, it isn't that simple.

See, what has to be done is that a blueprint has to be created first, consisting of the things that you'll need to use to build the object, layer by layer. I think I discussed that the blueprints have to be designed by the computer using a CAD, or computer aided design (see right). The designs are then corrected, if there are malfunctions in the design such as holes. Then the design goes through a piece of software called a "slicer".

The slicer coverts the model into many thin layers by using G-code software. The G-code file can then be printed using 3-D printing client software (which loads the G-code and directs it on what to do).

Typical resolution for 3-D printers describes layer thickness in dots per inch (DPI).The typical layer thickness is about 250 DPI, a bit thinner than paper. The particles in the food are about 500 DPI each.

So it simply goes layer by layer using various materials, copying the CAD, right?

Yup, layer by layer. Wasn't too hard to understand, right?

Well, it looks easier said than done.

Yeah...- WHOOPS! Talking to myself again. Do that a lot. Farewell for now, guys.