Future NZ: Fast food - 3D printing

Is 3D printing technology creating the new fast food of the future?

Fast food is not new - the ruins of Pompei contain about 120 fast food takeaway restaurants. Clearly the concept has evolved a lot during the past centuries - and we are now on the cusp of being able to 'print' foods containing whatever nutrients we want, in any shape we want.

If we look at food trends over history, we can see an evolution linked closely to technology. One hundred years ago we had little choice but to eat local, in-season, fresh, pesticide-free, zero-carbon food. Unfortunately it was also often half-rotten, sometimes adulterated, frequently dangerous and in limited supply. It was boring and expensive, and in winter you could starve. Mechanisation and industrial fertilisers brought copious, cheap farm produce. Processing made it safe and transportable.

Commerce made it interesting. Today, you can have any ethnic style at any time of year in any place in the world. It is 10,000 times less likely to contain bad bugs. It will not be adulterated with unexpected products, but may contain some of a limited number of permitted additives, themselves nearly all foods in their own right in one culture or another. This move to processing has been a massive trend - big enough to spawn a counter-trend: local, in-season, fresh, organic, zero-carbon.

Every generation has developed technology. And each generation has found more and more uses for the technology of the last. There seems to be a physical law that says a technology tends to leak into every application possible over time. Three-dimensional printing is becoming prevalent in a number of industries, but is only just emerging in food.

Perhaps one hundred different companies will end up making 3D food printers in the future, but only about 30 will dominate the manufacture of edible food inks and perhaps ten will dominate the algorithms needed to print the food.

Nearly a dozen groups around the world are now printing foods. Most are doing it the simple way, depositing a ready-mixed food material on a plate layer by layer to build up a shape. If you use chocolate paste it sets into a chocolate shape of your design. If you use three colours and flavours you can create a frozen dessert of any shape you like with the flavours and colours woven through at will. Some groups have made food pastes from insect parts.

At Massey we have chosen a harder problem: using a bland white native starch-and-gum-in-water paste, we are then adding food dyes, flavour and nutrient voxel by voxel (that is by volumetric pixel) during printing. This is then rapidly cooked to form a puffed food containing any image and a whole mix of flavours distributed throughout. We are not there yet, but this mixing in line approach is the route to near infinite flexibility.

There is one important secret. Don't try to emulate an existing food - you will always be second best. A printed food has no name yet. But one day it will have a name and we will all know it by that.

Already some innovative chefs are looking for food printers. In only a few years there will be a fast food chain. You will be able to bring your own recipe and image to create a food with colour and flavour through it. Maybe your phone generated the image from a photo you took. Maybe you downloaded it. Maybe you chose from an electronic menu on the machine.

In only a few more years you will be able to buy a printer for the kitchen along with cassettes of colour, flavour and nutrient from the supermarket.

This new technology, when applied to food, will be driven by excitement around novelty, by the kids before the adults, by those who want taste and fun. But there will be possibilities for those who have food allergies or are just health conscious as well because 3D food printing gives absolute certainty over nutrient content.

Professor Richard Archer is head of Massey University's Institute of Food, Nutrition and Human Health.