Physical and Digital | UX by Dovetailed

Digitising Food

nūfood 3D food printer

nūfood is the world’s first liquid-based 3D food printer, offering the ability to create juicy bites in a wide range of shapes, flavours and colours at the click of a button. Dovetailed invented the technique and designed & built a beautiful robot which enables you to unleash your culinary creativity in the kitchen or the dining table.

Born out of a hackathon, the original concept was inspired by scientific advances in tissue printing. Dovetailed designed its elegant form and experience to bring more interesting interactions and movement, adding playfulness and joy to cooking.

Ideation and prototyping

From idea to working prototype: we developed prototypes using off-the-shelf parts to create a technical demonstrator to prove the working of our novel 3D printing technique. We refined the robotics, fluidics, electronics and software using rapid prototyping and iterative techniques using tools in our lab in Cambridge and working with manufacturers locally and further afield.

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There is an App for it!

We know that designing in 3D is very complex and time consuming. So to fuse your creativity, we designed an app that allows you to sketch with pixels on a graph paper using your finger. You can also choose from a library of designs. Press <Play> and your flavour burst will be 3D printed in a matter of minutes.

The app also allows you to create new flavour pairings to be printed in a single shape.

Available on iOS and Android.

Crafting the experience

Our focus was on creating a robot that is fun and easy to use. For this, we took our printer to many expos and events and collected user feedback in a systematic way. This allowed us to understand how people would use nūfood in their home and then iterate the design ensuring that it fuels creativity, is fast and is convenient to use. Not forgetting the practicalities - very easy to keep clean.

Ready for your kitchen

The printer is now ready for commercial manufacture. Throughout our user research and design process we ensured that manufacturing costs were always kept in mind through regular reviews. This meant that we were able to significantly minimise the number of tooling parts required, saving on the overall costs of manufacturing. We therefore created a minimum lovable product in a lean way.

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Get your own nūfood 3D printer

nūfood has received a high level of interest and attention from both the general public and renowned chefs from around the world. Check our nūfood page for more details.

Check it out!