3D food printing: Perspectives

Due to consumers’ growing attention to personal health, food products that focus on personal care, healthy concepts and functional claims are emerging as a new trend. This motivates a growing market for personalized healthy food, which aims to tailor and fabricate diet specifically based on an individual’s health condition. Traditional food preparation processes even with advanced processing technologies cannot meet such demands. Three-dimensional (3D) food printing, also known as Food Layered Manufacture, can be one of the potential ways to bridge this gap. This is a digitally controlled, robotic construction process, which can build up complex 3D food products layer by layer. It aims to revolutionize food manufacturing with customized shape, color, flavor, texture, and even nutrition. Hence, food products can be designed and fabricated to meet individual needs through controlling the amount of printing material and nutrition content. Foods created by 3D printing have already entered the market. A range of 3D printing methods, platforms, materials and recipes have been utilized. This chapter reviews the common approaches and techniques used in food printing. The market challenges, technical difficulties and possible strategies along the pathway of commercialization are also discussed.