A Japanese company called Open Meals has set out to start a food revolution in which anyone can digitize, transmit and regenerate meals with the touch of a button.
The first step for Open Meals to achieve this food revolution is to collect food data and adding it to a digital database called Food Base. Once food data such as flavour, shape, colour, texture, density, and nutrients are collected, the ability to upload, search, download and distribute food data will become feasible.
In order to reproduce the food data, Open Meals is currently developing a patent-pending food printer called Pixel Food Printer. Equipped with an internal mechanism that generates flavoured, coloured, textured, and nutritional pixel gels, a robotic arm will be used to stack the pixel gels into food items.
Putting their concept to action at this year’s South by Southwest, sushi data from Japan was sent to Austin, Texas, where it was reproduced using a prototype Pixel Food Printer. The result was a plate of edible sushi made with 5 mm pixel gels, dubbed “8-bit sushi.” In order to create more precise reproductions, Open Meals intends to reduce the size of the pixel gels.
The last stage of the food revolution is CUBE, described as “digital format of the world’s first data food.” In this stage, Open Meals plans to create an application that can deconstruct ingredients found in a dish and recreate it in the form of a 3-cm cube.
To learn more about Open Meals, click the link below.
