We’ve seen a number of products aimed at 3D printing food, with none of them really sticking around because 3D-printed breakfast and dinner just sounds like a nasty dystopian future concept that’s a little too early for its time. You know what doesn’t sound too early for its time? 3D-printed chocolate. That’s why we have a feeling the Cocoa Press will fare just a bit better than other food-based 3D printers.
Yes, it’s a 3D printer for chocolate treats that you can use to fabricate sweet treats in all sorts of fancy shapes. Want chocolate that looks like a hand tool for your DIY projects? You can do that. How about an alien-shaped chocolate to celebrate your newfound ancient aliens obsession? You can indulge all you like. Basically, you can make a chocolate version of any 3D model file you can get your hands on.
The Cocoa Press looks like any regular 3D printer, with a barebones frame housing a print bed and an extruder hovering over the bed. Except, instead of squeezing melted plastic out of the extruder, it puts out a chocolate blend that hardens as soon as it’s layered on the bed, behaving much like the melted plastic in traditional 3D printers. According to the outfit, the extruder heats the chocolate to just below body temperature, which allows it to solidify in ambient temperature air as soon as it comes out.
Sadly, you can’t just dump in your favorite chocolate mixes and melt them for extrusion. Instead, the device uses chocolate “cores” that contain a blend of milk, dark chocolate, and palm oil, a formulation that, according to the outfit, works well for 3D printing. Don’t worry, you’re not locked to using their chocolate cores, as it can also work with your own mixes, provided you can produce a mix that doesn’t have air bubbles and can harden the same way upon extrusion. According to them, it’s going to be a bit of a challenge as they’ve had to experiment multiple times to find their formula, but it’s certainly possible, especially if you want to churn out chocolates in your signature recipe.
The Cocoa Press has a build volume of 5.5 x 6 x 6 inches, so you can produce a pretty sizeable piece of fancy-looking chocolate using this thing. Like regular 3D printing, though, it’s still not a fast process, with fabrications taking anywhere from five minutes (small simple designs) to two hours if you want to create something that maximizes that build volume. It comes with a touchscreen panel for control, while using standard STL and 3MF files, similar to traditional 3D printers.
If you like your chocolates with mix-ins such as nuts and rice crispies, the outfit claims you can add them during the build by simply pressing the pause button on the touchscreen panel and layering them in. Of course, they will likely affect how your fabrication turns out, so there will probably be some trial-and-error involved, so you don’t ruin the overall aesthetic.
The Cocoa Press is slated to retail in DIY kit form for $1,499 and a prebuilt package for $3,995. It’s slated to ship in the fall.