07 December 2008

Drink Jet Printing ~ Edible Art & Foamy Beverages

There's a long and glorious history of printing foods. Tim Anderson and Jim Bredt made their homebrew 3D printer in the bowels of MITERS in the old MIT Building 20 by hacking an ink-jet printhead out of a Canon 2D ink-on-paper printer and spraying water on layer after layer of sugar powder. Net result: 3D sugarcandy! They ended up spinning this technology out of MIT to co-found Z Corporation. And back in his MIT Media Lab days, Saul Griffith cooked up a 3D Chocolate Printer out of Legos, plans for which he later posted on Instructables. Now Scott Kirsner in his latest Innovation Economy column Art for the average joe, writes about OnLatte, the drink jet company spraying picture patterns out of edible caramel micro-droplets on top of foamy beverages like lattes and beer.

1 comment:

Scott Kirsner said...

I do like the parallel between Z Corp printing using sugar water and OnLatte.

I wish I had been sharp enough to come up with the term Drink Jet Printing. That's brilliant!