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GOURMET NEWS MARCH 2015 www.gourmetnews.com GENERAL NEWS 6 3-D Food Printing Continued from PAGE 1 is great. It was for this reason that 3D Sys- tems chose sweets and desserts as the ini- tial focus of what could be a much broader application for 3D food printing. "Confections are a great place to start 3- D printing food, because there's already a cultural expectation of a desert as a de- signed object. It's a space that values em- bellishment and experimentation and customization," said von Hasseln of the new technology that can create food in vir- tually limitless shapes. While The Sugar Lab's candies and mints are the first commercial 3D printed food products on the market, that could change later this year when 3D Systems begins sell- ing its ChefJet Pro food printer, geared to- ward professionals. Artisan confectioners, bakers, pastry chefs, molecular gastrono- mists and mixologists will be able to use the printer to create the same products as The Sugar Lab. Several other companies are also launching food printers this year, al- though these are geared primarily toward the home consumer market. While the initial focus of 3D food print- ing will be on smaller, artisan producers, that is not to say that large-scale manufac- turers are not also interested. However, Hod Lipson, Professor of Engineering at Cornell University and a leading expert on 3D food printing says that the technology for com- mercial-scale 3D manufacturing is still a few years off. He notes that the current small- scale printing process needs fine tuning as well. Products are currently created using highly technical 3-D design software, the same type used to create metal aircraft parts. "It's sort of an overkill," said Lipson. "The people who think up the products – chefs – currently have to learn complex software to design their own products." 3-D Systems plans to address this issue by offering kitchen-specific software for re- lease along with the ChefJet Pro printer that will be much more intuitive than CAD-based modeling software. This soft- ware will be organized like a cookbook, so users can choose whether they are working on an 8-inch cake round topper or a cock- tail garnish for an old fashioned. The soft- ware will have a library of existing shapes that can be modified and personalized, but will also offer the capability to use more ad- vanced tools or design from scratch. There are three types of 3D food printing at present. The ChefJet from 3D Systems lays down a layer of powder that is then so- lidified with a jetted liquid, with subse- quent layers added until the item is complete. The second type of printing, used by Professor Lipson and his team at Cornell, involves food pastes, liquids and gels, where a syringe-like device extrudes a paste that is gradually built into a three-di- mensional shape. A third, less developed mode of 3D printing is laser-based, in which a laser device transforms liquid or powder into solid. The future of 3D food printing could involve one or more of these modes, possibly in combination. Like with many new technologies, when it comes to 3D food printing, production cost is a concern. As the technology is re- fined and becomes more efficient, the cost of manufacturing could decrease. As of now, that $36 box of candies could come down in price as a manufacturer increases its capacity by purchasing more printers. The Sugar Lab currently prints its candies in runs of 100, a process that takes 1 hour. This productivity rate pales in comparison to many traditional manufacturing processes. Los Angeles-based The Sugar Lab will move production to a new, larger facility in Hollywood this sum- mer, increasing its productivity. Looking to the future, food and technol- ogy companies are also currently exploring the potential for cooking 3D printed foods. While some food printer prototypes in- clude rudimentary heating capabilities, fu- ture versions could have the ability to cook in complex fashion, for instance, creating a pastry with a crunchy outside but soft in- side. Lipson's team calls this process "in- line cooking." While time will tell if 3D printing plays an integral role in the food manufacturing world, some key players are betting that it will. Hershey's is already in the second year of a partnership with 3D Systems to de- velop retail products, both chocolate and non-chocolate, as well as food printers. The team's first output, the CocoJet chocolate printer series, previewed at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. 3D Systems will be announcing plans for the sale of the printers, as well as details of their applica- tion, at a later date. While the new technology conjures a fu- turistic, best-thing-ever quality, 3D food printing is not meant to make current man- ufacturing processes better. It is meant to do something different, and valuable. Pro- fessor Lipson points out, "We're not talking about making foods that you can already make some other way. This is not a replace- ment. The question is, if you have a tool that can put together food ingredients in multiple complex ways according to a 3D geometry program, what could you make with it, that you cannot make manually?" One way in which 3D food printers could be very different is their potential for highly specific ingredient control. With food printers that contain multiple food cartridges and nozzles, a manufacturer will be able to precisely control, for example, sugar content. With one nozzle containing a cookie batter without sugar, and another nozzle holding the same recipe but includ- ing sugar, a simple command from the printer's software can combine the two in any proportion, to meet the needs of a spe- cific customer base – for example, diabet- ics. Shifting such a recipe within a traditional manufacturing process would involve a far more time-consuming process. Lipson's prototype printer at Cornell has printed sugar cookies with more or less sugar in just this way. "I believe that once these 3D printing tools become popular, we will see a whole generation of a new kind of chef," said Lipson. "Basically a software chef, one that knows how to program these machines and create things that we can't even imag- ine today." GN Specialty Food Foundation Announces Grants to 14 Anti-Hunger Programs The Specialty Food Foundation has awarded $250,000 in grants to support in- novative organizations in 10 states that are working to address hunger and improve food recovery. These are the first grants to be made by the Foundation, which was es- tablished last year by the Specialty Food Association. The grant recipients were hon- ored at the President's Reception at the Winter Fancy Food Show in January. The Specialty Food Foundation works to reduce hunger and increase food recovery efforts via grantmaking, education and in- dustry events. It is an outgrowth of the so- cial entrepreneurship and extensive efforts in the areas of anti-hunger put forth by many members of the Specialty Food Asso- ciation, a not-for-profit trade association for food artisans, importers and entrepreneurs. Among the first grant recipients are Port- land Fruit Tree Project in Portland, Oregon and Move for Hunger in Neptune, New Jer- sey. Portland Fruit Tree Project harvests and distributes fruit from urban fruit trees that would otherwise go to waste. Move for Hunger mobilizes the relocation industry to reduce food waste by picking up un- wanted food during the moving process to deliver to food banks. Additional grant recipients include Ceres Community Project in Sebastopol, California; Farmer Foodshare in Chapel Hill, North Carolina; Foodbank of South- eastern Virginia in Norfolk; Food Forward in North Hollywood, California; Food Runners in San Francisco; Food Shift in Berkeley, California; Operation Food Search in St Louis; Rio Grande Food Proj- ect in Albuquerque, New Mexico; Rolling Harvest Food Rescue in Lumberville, Pennsylvania; Second Helpings in Indi- anapolis; Table to Table in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey; and Tarrant Area Food Bank in Fort Worth, Texas. "With hunger a part of so many lives today, these organizations are playing a key role in addressing the problem in creative ways for the communities they serve," said Ron Tanner, Vice President of Philanthropy, Government and Industry Relations for the Specialty Food Association. "These first grants will help them refine and expand their important work." In 2015, the foundation plans to build on its efforts by awarding $400,000 in grants, and by presenting two special events, Em- brace Hunger Relief Days, to encourage the specialty food community to volunteer for hunger relief organizations. Learn more at www.specialtyfoodfoundation.org. GN Impact of Disease-Associated Malnutrition in United States Estimated at $157 Billion Annually Even in food-abundant industrialized countries like the United States, an alarm- ing number of people, particularly seniors, suffer from disease-associated malnutrition. Because of the impact on patient health, disease-associated malnutrition poses a sig- nificant economic burden, costing the United States approximately $157 billion annually. This is according to new research published in the Journal of Parenteral and Enteral Nutrition. Researchers looked at malnutrition across eight specific diseases and evaluated the direct medical costs, the years of quality life lost and mortality to de- termine the total economic burden. The cost was calculated using existing literature and estimates from the National Health In- terview Survey, the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. When looking across the eight diseases, researchers found that more than 80 percent of the total cost came from cases of depres- sion, chronic obstructive pulmonary dis- ease, coronary heart disease and dementia. Patients with COPD, depression and de- mentia had the highest rates of malnutrition at 11 percent, 10.4 percent and 7.9 percent, respectively. On a per patient basis, colorec- tal cancer, coronary heart disease and stroke patients account for the highest economic burden, despite these conditions accounting for a small proportion of the overall burden. Disease-associated malnutrition affects about 10 percent of chronically ill patients in the public and between 30 and 50 per- cent of patients admitted to hospitals. When malnutrition goes undiagnosed, par- ticularly in seniors, it can lead to increases in health complications, hospital readmis- sion rates and overall health care costs. While older patients represent only a small subset of the population studied (13 percent), the research found that nearly 33 percent of the total economic burden ($51.3 billion) from malnutrition came from people 65 and older. "Particularly among older people, mal- nutrition can often go under the radar, be- cause the focus is on treating their primary condition," said Robert H. Miller, Divi- sional Vice President of Research and De- velopment for Scientific and Medical Affairs at Abbott Nutrition. "With new re- search showing the burden that malnutri- tion has on our community and our health care systems, doctors, hospitals and care- givers should factor in the importance of nutrition and nutritional screenings to help improve health outcomes for people at risk for malnutrition." Additional information on the study, in- cluding authors and affiliation, can be found at www.pen.sagepub.com. GN

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