Fast Casual: 3D Printed Pizzas Are a Thing Now—And They Could Revolutionize the Industry

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.

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