I can't believe it's taken me 3 years of reporting on 3D printing industry news to discover that it's entirely possible to 3D print with chocolate!
Now, before you get excited and rush to your local corner shop for some Cadbury bars, it's worth mentioning that only specific 3D printers can do this. Please do not load anything other than plastic spools into your home machine. Even if you own one of the best 3D printers on the market, chocolate will most definitely ruin it.
To 3D print with chocolate, you'll need what's known as the Cocoa Press, a machine that's actively shaping the future of chocolate through 3D printing. The Cocoa Press was created by founder and CEO, Ellie Weinstein, back in 2014 as part of an intro to engineering project she worked on during her senior year.
What started as a high school project soon became a developed business model, with pitches that involved selling the Cocoa Press to chocolate shops, bakeries, and event planners. The team also began producing uniquely shaped chocolates for both businesses and consumers to purchase.
Want to know the best part? While the Cocoa Press is intended for chocolatiers who know what they're doing, technically, yes, you can actually buy the Cocoa Press for yourself if you want to try it out.
It even ships to the UK through a third-party seller (see below).
The price is unbelievably reasonable for an industrial machine too, at just $1,499 / £1,199 for the Cocoa Press 2 DIY kit. This will require 3D printing your own parts, and will take about 10 hours to build (which is no time at all for most 3D print enthusiasts). Or if you want the hassle-free preassembled option, it will cost you $4,499.
Amazingly, Cocoa Press also uses the typical .stl and .3mf files, which are standard across all 3D printers, so there's no limit to what you could print. The chocolate used for a print gets heated all at the same time, instead of being fed into the printer as it goes, the way that plastic spools do.
The video above might be 5 years old now, but it provides a good scope to understand how the Cocoa Press could be used to improve your catering business.
Instead of plastic spools, the Cocoa Press has its own chocolate cocoa cores and reusable cartridge system for the easiest and most reliable results. While it's perfectly fine to use your own chocolate with the Cocoa Press, you'll need to make sure it's air-bubble-free and do some testing to find the right temperatures.
Would you ever try printing with chocolate? Let me know in the comments below.
