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How can a 3D-printed pizza change the world?

Yes, 3D printed pizzas are pretty cool, but talk to the people behind this food-printing robot and you will find it could also be a real life-changing addition to the world for people with disabilities, impairments or even lack of cooking skills.

July 12, 2016 by S.A. Whitehead — Food Editor, Net World Media Group

3D printers are everywhere lately, building their amazing products a layer at a time for everything from life-changing items like human skin and fully functional prosthetic limbs, to the wild and weirder stuff, like life-size custom models of your baby in the womb, as well as eyeglasses that supposedly help you lose weight. It may seem a bit odd then, that it's still tough for some of us to get our heads around something as common as 3D printed pizza. And yet, that is, in fact, the case, according to the innovators behind just such a printer.

The engineers and scientists at Beehex, who recently announced they have been collaborating with Chef Pasquale Cozzolino on the pizza printer, said they met with that kind of disbelief among some of the first individuals to see, smell and finally taste the end-product of their pizza printer.

"Some of the first questions for people who knew nothing about this are 'Can you eat this?' " said Cozzolino in a phone interview with pizzamarketplace.com. "Maybe they know it's 3D printing and they don't think it's real pizza, or it's like we're just making plastic that looks like real pizza. … But, I say 'Of course! Of course!'

"But, we've done a number of samplings … you know, and when the ingredients are great, the feedback is great, too."

Of course, a lot of that crowd probably grew up using Play-doh to make — and sometimes even eat — such faux "pizza" and other "meals" in their homes and art classes. The fact is that once people actually do taste the machine-made concoction, they are sold, Cozzolino said. And that's probably a good thing, because the chef and the other primaries behind this new-age business say printed food of all varieties is very much going mainstream.

For Cozzolino — a classically trained Italian chef and owner of the fine New York City and Atlanta-based locations of Ribalta restaurant — this pizza-printing "robot," as he calls it, is something of a mechanical dream come true. It is, in essence, the perfect melding of this chef's love for great food and fascination with great technology. Part of that techno-affinity might be due to the fact that this machine is one robot-chef that follows orders almost perfectly.

That is because contrary to what you might think, Beehex's pizza printer works around the chef and his or her ingredients, not the other way around. As a result, Cozzolino was able to create printed pizzas at the recent Food Loves Tech show in New York City using the same ingredients he and his chefs use at his restaurants.

Beehex co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer Jordan French said that's why they had the freedom to go to one of the best pizza chefs they could find to create recipes for their printer. The way French puts it, the pizza robot they've created is the kind of machine that can almost literally duplicate genius, like that of a great chef, by following his or her recipe exactly, resulting in the same kind of gastronomic perfection.

"The robot is pretty versatile," said French in a phone interview with pizzamarketplace.com. "So we can put a lot of pressure on something or very little. That's the neat thing about this, is we can print almost anyone's dough, sauce or cheese. For example, at Food loves Tech, Pasquale ... just showed up with Ribalta dough, Ribalta sauce and Ribalta cheese and we were able to print it, with very minor adjustments to the pressure than we used for a different recipe we were using before. So we're able to adjust to the ingredients we want to print."

Beehex's pizza printer uses one of the more complex approaches available in 3D printing, according to French. It uses a pneumatic system to push the ingredients out and then more or less "suck" them back in, as needed, to make the perfect crust, and compile it correctly with the right sauce, cheese and toppings.

French said some 3D printers use either a mold or simple syringe to create products, which can be more haphazard and cumbersome for some products. But French said the pneumatic system gives them a lot of control of the ingredients, as well as that critical tension they're prepared under.

"So in contrast, rather than through a syringe, the pneumatic system is more like a piston that can push and pull and suck up, allowing us to much more tightly control how much comes out and when and where it comes out," French said. "Other benefits of the pneumatic system like we use is you can put a lot of pressure on it and you can change that pressure. So, for example, something that's less viscous or more liquid-y, like sauce, you can extrude much more easily with lower pressure. We adjust that pressure so it's lower for the sauce than for the dough. The robot knows to adjust this based off of what it's extruding and the computer design for what it needs to follow when it prints."

Recreating genius in the kitchen

Everywhere Beehex's pizza printer has demonstrated its mechanical culinary expertise, it has been extremely well received from both a performance and taste standpoint, according to French. That's great news, but not the real ground-shaking news that this technology might ultimately hold for our world. For instance, they say that not only is this printer capable of nearly identical duplication of a renowned chef's recipes and methods, but it also promises to alleviate many problems encountered in daily living by those with disabilities or other limitations that may make many kinds of food preparation difficult or impossible.

"I'm excited working with (Beehex) and what, in the future, will be many other things," said Cozzolino. "For instance, this technology can be used for someone who's handicapped or even elderly. Or it can be used for printing food in space for NASA or printing food in any kind of environment where knowledge of food preparation is not that high. With this, everybody is able to enjoy high quality."

French added that the technology allows professionals, like Cozzolino and other nutrition experts even to concentrate on the healthful aspects of any particular recipe.

"So one thing to remind you here is that one of the things Pasquale is known for is the 'pizza diet' and for losing his own weight on it and then others, too. So, that's something we're after and we want to emphasize too that by using healthy ingredients we can make a change in the world."

Where does it go from here? Well, these two were fairly closed-mouth about that, although French did mention the word "chocolate" as being something they have their sights on.
But in the meantime, the whole idea of perhaps one day having a renowned pizza chef-a-la-robot to serve you straight from his or her cookbook, no matter where you are in the world, is a pretty significant one. That holds particularly true, said Cozzolino, for the cooking-averse consumers that fill all those tiny, tough-to-work-in kitchens across New York City.

"I think every food can be basically printed. And I think the world is going to take it in that direction," Cozzolino said. "It's kind of like when the people used to jump up from the chair to change the channels, but now they use the remote. Well, now it's kind of like the same thing where you can cook sitting on the couch. And people in New York don't want to cook. So maybe now I'll invite friends to my home and maybe I'll cook with my printer."

About S.A. Whitehead

Pizza Marketplace and QSRweb editor Shelly Whitehead is a former newspaper and TV reporter with an affinity for telling stories about the people and innovative thinking behind great brands.