It’s easy enough to embrace 3D printing technology when it’s doing something cool like drawing stuff in mid-air or making adorable prosthetic limbs for injured animals…but eating 3D printed food? That seems a little out there for most people. A company called Dovetailed aims to make it much more mainstream by putting 3D printed fruits into kitchens around the world.

The company’s 3D fruit printer actually uses technology that has been around for quite a while: spherification. The process, invented in the 1950s, basically takes regular liquids and encloses them in an edible outer membrane. Dovetailed has been working with Microsoft to create their proprietary 3D printer, which they unveiled at the Tech Food Hack of 2014 in Cambridge, UK.

According to Dovetailed, the machine can print any real-life fruit – the flavor, size and shape of the “fruits” are fully customizable. This means that you can not only print apples and bananas, but customize your fruit flavors to create something completely new. As cool as the idea is, the process begs the question: how healthy can these fruit creations really be if they’re made of juice, missing the fiber and vital nutrients of real, fresh, natural fruit?

The post The Future of Food: 3D Printed Fruit Comes in Any Flavor first appeared on Gajitz.

American manufacturing company 3D Systems showcased a world’s first earlier this month. The Consumer Electonics Show in Las Vegas was the lucky venue to display their two 3D printers, the first meant for food.

The Chefjet and Chefjet Pro are both certified and ready for kitchen use. They use regular inkjet print heads, but this time, according to 3D Systems’ Liz von Hasseln, “it spreads a very fine layer of sugar then paints water onto the surface of the sugar, and that water allows the sugar to recrystalise and harden to form these complex geometries.” It can print sugar in three flavors (the odd trio of mint, cherry and sour apple) and can also print in milk chocolate.

Formerly The Sugar Lab, the launch of the Chefjet and Chefjet pro comes at the heels of 3D Systems’ acquisition of the technology. It was created back in 2011 by von Hasseln, then a recent architecture graduate, and her husband Kyle von Hasseln. The printer will cost around $5,000, so let’s hope it’s not another Salad Shooter.

The post Meet the Chefjet: It’s the World’s First 3D Printer for Food first appeared on Gajitz.