Barilla Wants to 3D Print Pasta in Potential Shakeup to Food Industry
We’ve covered the 3d printing of candy, houses, jewelry, cars and plenty of other items.
You can add pasta to that list thanks to the folks over at Barilla, the Italian pasta brand founded in 1877.
Earlier this year we reported on Barilla’s attempts to create their very own 3d printer capable of creating customized pasta shapes on-demand. The Italian company has taken that concept one step further now, asking its customers around the world for their best designs of 3d printed pasta, and plans to pay the winners of this contest over $1,000 each.
“Barilla, always attentive to innovation and technological development, is looking for new pasta shapes specifically designed for the innovative 3D printer for pasta, first announced at Expo 2015 and presented to the public at CIBUS 2016,” the company writes, in conjunction with it’s partner Desall — an Italian design firm. “Barilla, which is about to celebrate the 140th year of activity, now relies on the community of designers and creatives of Desall to explore the huge potential made possible through this new production technology, conveying into an innovative shape the values and the care for tradition that have always characterized the Barilla brand.”
The contest is emphasizing size and utility of the pasta. Designers are asked to think outside the box of traditional pasta shapes and if they so choose, create larger than normal pasta as well as shapes that “might interact with the other ingredients.”
Interested designers can upload their CAD files (3d design files that are used as 3d printable files) to the contest site and a winner will be chosen in May of 2017.
This story is another example of the changes that 3d printing is set to bring to the culinary industry as food companies and restaurants around the world look at new ways of serving food with the advent of easy to use hardware.
