PERFORMANCE
As I am nearing the end of my blog for Genius Hour, I have stumbled across a certain website named foodnavigator.com that presented to me some valuable information about the new ideas of 3-D printing food, and one fact surprised me. This 3-D printing food idea that I had for my Genius Hour dates way back to 2010 with a company called Biozoon.
Here's the backstory.
Biozoon's Smoothfood concept project was introduced in 2010 by the German company, the project being aimed at elderly at nursing homes with mastication and swallowing problems. This also corresponds with one of my previous blogs about the Dutch TNO organization.
Moving on, FoodNavigator talked with Biozoon's CEO Matthias Kuck about the subject. He said that:
"We Are a food company specializing in texturising food. We take fresh food items and transform them into different textures. The aim is that the food will taste like and look similar to the real food but will be available for all to eat as it can be without swallowed without being chewed."
The company created a food processing project called PERFORMANCE, the acronym meaning PERsonalized FOod using Rapid MAnufacturing for the Nutrition of elderly ConsumErs, aimed at manufacturing convenient, personalized food with a 3-D printer. The company received a 2.9 million Euros of funding from the EU and is expected to be completed by the end of the year.
It has also been sponsored by an unusual 10 industry partners which is very untypical for this kind of research project. The researchers are not only aiming to produce the foods for elderly, but are aiming to mass-produce them on a global scale, which is great.
Kuck believed that the concept wouldn't just change the lives of the elderly but revolutionize the food industry as well, which shows how many people are probably on the bandwagon. However, he added that the biggest challenge would be convincing the public that they were using fresh food with no chemicals, only texture was changed, which is the big problem as of now, the persuasion of the general public. But once word gets out that the stuff is all-pure, people will start paying more attention.
That's all for this blog post, stick around for the next post, which'll just be a big shout-out to the audience, a VLog and then that's all because in June, I will be working with classmates on formulating a TED talk. Gotta say, I am nervous but I am confident that I can do this.
