Instead of outputting in plastic, this printer builds models that you can eat:
All of the best 3D printers print from some form plastic, either from filament or from resin. But an upcoming printer, Cocoa Press, uses chocolate to create models you can eat. The brainchild of Maker and Battlebots Competitor Ellie Weinstein , who has been working on iterations of the printer since 2014, Cocoa Press will be available for pre-order, starting on April 17th via cocoapress.com (the company is also named Cocoa Press).
[...] In lieu of a roll of filament or a tank full of resin, the Cocoa Press uses 70g cartridges of special chocolate that solidifies at up to 26.67 degrees Celsius (80 degrees Fahrenheit), which the company will sell for $49 for a 10 pack. The cigar-shaped chocolate pieces go into a metal syringe where the entire thing is melted at the same time rather than melting as it passes through the extruder (like a typical FDM printer).
Video demonstrating how the Cocoa Press works.
Related: Why Chocolate Feels So Good? It's Down to Lubrication
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Scientists have decoded the physical process that takes place in the mouth when chocolate is eaten, as it changes from a solid into a smooth emulsion that many people find totally irresistible:
By analysing each of the steps, the interdisciplinary research team from the School of Food Science and Nutrition and the School of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Leeds hope it will lead to the development of a new generation of luxury chocolate that will have the same feel and texture but will be healthier to consume.
During the moments it is in the mouth, the chocolate sensation arises from the way the chocolate is lubricated, either from ingredients in the chocolate itself or from saliva or a combination of the two.
Fat plays a key function almost immediately when a piece of chocolate is in contact with the tongue. After that, solid cocoa particles are released and they become important in terms of the tactile sensation, so fat deeper inside the chocolate plays a rather limited role and could be reduced without having an impact on the feel or sensation of chocolate.
[...] "If a chocolate has 5% fat or 50% fat it will still form droplets in the mouth and that gives you the chocolate sensation. However, it is the location of the fat in the make-up of the chocolate which matters in each stage of lubrication, and that has been rarely researched.
"We are showing that the fat layer needs to be on the outer layer of the chocolate, this matters the most, followed by effective coating of the cocoa particles by fat, these help to make chocolate feel so good."
[...] "Our research opens the possibility that manufacturers can intelligently design dark chocolate to reduce the overall fat content.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Opportunist on Sunday March 12 2023, @12:31PM (18 children)
First, the obvious elephant in the room: A kilogram of that stuff costs like 70 bucks. That's roughly ten times the price of normal chocolate. And as anyone who ever worked with 3D printing before can tell you, it will take a few attempts to get stuff right. So you might want to consider spending about 100 bucks per kilogram of "product".
Second, 26 degrees Celsius is considerably below the body temperature of the average human. Not only that, but it's also not that far above the usual ambient temperature. This stuff will melt if left out in the open. My guess is that it uses crystalline phase III [compoundchem.com], which is not exactly the most desirable phases, but sure the easiest to achieve. There is a reason good confectioners are proud of their chocolate glazing and why you often don't get "real" chocolate glazing on your cakes but rather some fat-based ... something instead. It's cheaper and far, far less work. Crystallizing chocolate properly is an artform, and frankly, something I would have expected from a machine like this, twice so if the chocolate used is this expensive. But I guess that's just something few enough people know so they thought, why bother? Back to topic, though, 26 degrees (phase III or IV) is very undesirable, not only does it melt very close to ambient temperature and certainly will melt in your hands, you can also not cool it easily because it tends to "sweat". In general, not exactly what you want.
And then the final reason: Why do it that way? Phase III chocolate is trivial to achieve. Melt chocolate, pour it somewhere without giving a fuck how it crystalizes and you have a decent chance to end up with phase III chocolate anyway. If not, melt and try again. How would this be superior in any way whatsoever to the good old mold-and-pour method?
Frankly, this looks like a (very bad) solution to a nonexistent problem.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12 2023, @01:34PM (3 children)
Just melt the bad print with your hands and let the chocolate drip back into the cylinder feeding the extruder.
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Sunday March 12 2023, @01:50PM (2 children)
I could imagine that they somehow made sure that this won't work. Why would you buy their 70 bucks a kilo chocolate if you could just dump any into it?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday March 12 2023, @02:42PM (1 child)
Was going to say: it probably barely works in the first place and recycled feedstock will be even more problematic: melt and congeal temp points would move, viscosity would vary, etc. Even with the smallest contaminant content.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Informative) by Opportunist on Sunday March 12 2023, @04:31PM
Doesn't even have to be contaminated, the melting point of chocolate moves considerably already (between about 17 and 37 degrees Celsius) depending on how you let it crystalize. Have it cool down too fast and you end up with liquid goop the second time around, store it for 5 months and it will probably clog the printer because it won't melt enough.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Sunday March 12 2023, @01:52PM (1 child)
I entirely agree. And seeing that the cost of the 3D printer is quoted as $1,499, I don't see this selling more that a couple of sets to people who have more money than sense.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Opportunist on Sunday March 12 2023, @02:33PM
I mean, I could see a few ideas where this could be useful, but in the current configuration, this won't fly.
First, the price of chocolate. I know, they want to make some money, but going up a magnitude from the usual asking price of chocolate is beyond inane. Even premium chocolate doesn't cost more than 30 dollars a kilogram. Retail. Wholesale chocolate prices are around 5-7 dollars a kilo. Now, of course this has to be mixed and adjusted with other ingredients, but allow me to say that no matter the composition of chocolate, the cocoa tends to be the most expensive one. Everything else is usually fairly cheap. Now, I don't know the calculation behind this, but there might be either a supply-side problem involved where they buy the ingredients far too expensive, the processing needs some serious streamlining or they just overestimate the ability to squeeze money out of this.
Then, the crystalisation process. As stated before, chocolate has many configurations depending on how you treat it. And it should be quite possible to treat it properly in a setup like this to create a phase V outcome. With a price tag like this, you're aiming for a premium crowd, so you should provide a premium product. Phase III and IV aren't. That's at best the quality level of cheap non-brand chocolate bars. Or a very poorly done amateur cake glazing by someone who has no idea what they're doing. The only thing this could be made worse is to put it in the fridge and end up with a Phase I. If you're running a price tag of 1500-3000 for the printer and 100 a kilo, the very LEAST I would expect is that you somehow managed to solve the (admittedly nontrivial) problem of crystalizing it in a phase V configuration. Either solve this problem or realize that you're competing with 1-buck-a-bar store chocolate.
And then, what could this actually be used for. Because you're competing with cheap mold-cast chocolate at this rate. That's your competition. "But you have to have a mold!", I hear them say. Yes. And? I 3D print one out of PLA, pour the chocolate in and throw the mold away. And it's STILL cheaper than this. Either you have to find something that can't be mold-cast or you have to find a different application. What I could see is this being used as some way to decorate chocolate cakes at a detail level that cannot be gotten otherwise, or at least would require a lot of (expensive) manual labor to accomplish.
This is, as far as I can tell, the only sensible application for this contraption.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by quietus on Sunday March 12 2023, @02:36PM (3 children)
Anecdote, but the daughter of an aquaintance went for a specialisation in chocolate desserts (she worked at a 2 star restaurant at the time). The course, fulltime, took 3 years.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Opportunist on Sunday March 12 2023, @02:48PM (2 children)
Yes, chocolate is not exactly a trivial stuff to work with. There's a LOT to take into consideration and it's very easy to screw something up if you don't know a lot about it. You can spend a year alone on temperatures, chocolate is very sensitive to temperatures, getting that right is an artform all by itself. The temperature range between not hot enough and too hot is very slim, for that aforementioned phase V couverture you'd need to heat chocolate to exactly 104 degrees C. So no, stirring it over water won't do because water evaporates at 100 degrees. So good luck keeping that temperature perfect while keeping the chocolate stirring (because it isn't that good a thermal conductor either you can very easily end up with one side of your pot burned and one side not hot enough if you don't know how to stir)... and so on. There's a LOT to take into account.
And I have a hunch that the maker of this chocolate printer didn't know any of that. All they probably thought is that it's chocolate. I mean, every kid knows chocolate, how hard could it possibly be?
(Score: 4, Informative) by janrinok on Sunday March 12 2023, @04:00PM (1 child)
I don't think that is the case. From the linked source (I know, ain't nobody got time to read that!) :
This is not the very first printer that Cocoa Press has released. Weinstein's company sold a larger and much more expensive model, technically known as version 5 "Chef," for $9,995 back in 2020, but she stopped producing that and is now focusing on the less expensive, smaller model. She told us that everyone who bought the old model will receive a free copy of the new one.
Now it doesn't say how many she sold, but she did sell some. However, at that price it was definitely a niche market and now she appears to be targetting a wider group of potential buyers.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Monday March 13 2023, @03:24AM
I'm guessing the target market is the specialty catering niche, where you need some business-specific decorative edible, and the novelty of doing it in imaginatively-printed chocolate gets you the gig over the otherwise-equivalent caterer.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday March 12 2023, @02:40PM (7 children)
3D printing molds for chocolate is old school. Best method I have seen is to print what you want (positive) then pour a food grade silicone mold on that, peel that off and use it for pouring chocolates.
I agree, this is stage I early development, hardly worth anything other than market research, almost where the earliest 3d metal printers were at. Maybe it will be enough to get people who have real fancy chocolate selling market access to work with them on development.
At least, even though it's overpriced, when a print fails it's not a total waste.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Funny) by Opportunist on Sunday March 12 2023, @04:03PM (6 children)
Well, you can eat your mistakes. That's one aspect it sure is better in than most other 3D printers.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday March 12 2023, @04:22PM (5 children)
In my experience 3d print failures are rarely outright mistakes, more often adhesion issues of various types... Some maybe you could control for better and you might call them mistakes, but most for me were out of the blue something stuck, or more often didn't, when it was supposed to do the opposite.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Sunday March 12 2023, @04:29PM (4 children)
You can design something and it comes out perfect the first time you print it? I'm impressed.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Sunday March 12 2023, @05:50PM (3 children)
Depends on the part, simple stuff? Pretty much every time, using open scad. Things with friction fit tolerances? Yeah, that usually takes a few iterations.
One of the first projects we did with the printer was to make an Alphabet of printed block letters 3.5" tall. My son would hand sketch-draw the outline in Blender, extrude it up into a block letter shape, then send it to the slicer software and print it. Simple, and they worked pretty much first try every time.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Sunday March 12 2023, @06:02PM (2 children)
My designs are rarely simple. No later than when you make hinges, you want to do a few testbeds to know what tolerances you have to permit.
(Score: 4, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Sunday March 12 2023, @08:47PM (1 child)
Yeah, hinges and snap lids are tricky, especially on smaller parts. Something like this: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2856710 [thingiverse.com] no worries.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Sunday March 12 2023, @10:37PM
Thanks for sharing the scad file.
I often wonder, why don't people just share the projects and only the finished stl? Sometimes it really bothers me that all I would like is THAT thing... with a tiny little adjustment I just can't make now because they didn't bother to include the project itself.