Food 3D Printing: Piping Bags to ABB Robot Arms

Food 3D printing builds a dish layer by layer from a paste pushed through a nozzle, the way a plastic printer builds a part. It started with chocolate and cookie dough on university printers and now makes plant-based salmon fillets sold in European supermarkets. This post follows the idea from hand piping and chocolate moulds, through the first food printers such as Foodini and the Barilla pasta printer, to Revo Foods in Vienna, which set out plans this month to scale up its multi-nozzle printing. It also looks at where ABB robots, which already print metal and concrete, could fit into food.

A Revo Foods printer next to a printed salmon style fillet, THE FILET, 2023. Photo: Robi313 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Piping bags, chocolate moulds and the first food printers

Long before printers, shaping food by hand was skilled work. A cake decorator filled a piping bag with icing and pressed it through a metal tip, drawing lines, shells and letters in one steady movement. Chocolate makers poured tempered chocolate into metal moulds to get rabbits, eggs and figures. Both methods are close to what a printer does today: piping is extrusion by hand, and a mould fixes the shape before the food sets. The difference is that a mould makes thousands of identical pieces, while a decorator could change the design on every cake.

A decorator piping buttercream scrolls onto a white cake with a piping bag. Photo: Michael Prudhomme, CakesMadeEasy.com / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.5)

Robots arrived at the moulds first. In 2010 Frank-Peter Kirgis, then head of robotics at ABB Switzerland, told ConfectioneryNews that robots were handling the moulds for hollow chocolate figures. He also described the painting and decoration of sweets by a depositing system combined with robotics. German, Italian and French confectionery makers, in that order, had the most robot applications, he said. A depositing robot moves a nozzle over food along a programmed path, which is also what a food printer does.

A metal mould for a chocolate Easter bunny at the Halloren chocolate museum in Halle, Germany. Photo: Dguendel / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

The first true food printers came from research labs. In 2006 the Fab@Home project, led by students at Cornell University, became the first multi-material 3D printer to print food such as chocolate, cookie dough and cheese. Choc Edge in the UK sold the first commercial chocolate printer in 2012. Natural Machines launched the Foodini in 2014, with an app for designing what it prints, and 3D Systems showed a chocolate printer with Hershey the same year. In 2015 the Dutch research group TNO and Barilla presented a pasta printer, along with a yearly competition for pasta designs.

The word Sweet printed in chocolate by a Rokit Chocosketch printer, 2015. Photo: Maurizio Pesce / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Revo Foods and printing plant-based fish today

Most food printers still work like the early ones. A computer moves an extrusion head over a three-axis stage, and compressed air or a screw squeezes the food paste through the nozzle. The Dutch start-up Novameat printed a meat-free steak from vegetables in 2018. In 2023 the Austrian company Revo Foods put the first 3D printed food on supermarket shelves, at Germany's Rewe group, with a salmon-style fillet called THE FILET. It builds the texture of fish by printing layers of protein and fat.

The syringe extruder of a RIG FoodForm3D food printer at 3D Printshow London, 2014. Photo: Creative Tools / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

On 2 October 2026 VoxelMatters reported on Revo's plans to scale up. The Vienna company runs six printers and says they make one food item every three seconds. Each printer carries 16 nozzles and makes eight fillets at a time, and the same machine switches between whitefish, salmon and El Pollo, a chicken alternative made with mycoprotein. Revo has turned printing into continuous production. It plans to add more printers and nozzles instead of buying bigger machines, so one printer can stop for service without halting the line. The components for each printer cost about €25,000.

A row of 3D food printers on display, 2018. Photo: Weclhk / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Revo is raising €2 million and aims to be profitable by the third quarter of 2027, CEO David Petuzzi said, with Germany and Austria bringing in about 80 percent of sales. ABB is not part of Revo's line in any source we found. Its link to the field is printing in other materials. ABB's 3D Printing PowerPac for RobotStudio turns a slicer file into robot code, and ABB arms have printed a steel bridge for MX3D, as we covered in our post on metal 3D printing.

An engineer runs a robot 3D print planned in ABB RobotStudio. Photo: ABB

Where food printing heads in homes and factories

In factories, the next step is around the printers. A line making eight fillets at a time still needs someone to lift trays, pack portions and stack cases. ABB IRB 360 FlexPicker robots already pick and pack small food items on fast conveyors, and they could pack printed fillets as a possibility. An extruder could also be mounted on a six-axis arm, so it can print on curved surfaces or decorate a finished cake from the side. ABB described robots carrying a depositing nozzle for sweets back in 2010.

A FlexPicker cell set up with ABB's PickMaster Lite software. Photo: ABB

At home, food printers are still rare. In September 2026 Euronews still called food printing a niche technology, twelve years after the Foodini went on sale. Research points to other uses. Scientists are testing printed meals for people who have trouble swallowing, with recent work on rapeseed protein gels thickened with cassava starch. NASA-backed researchers reported in August 2026 that engineered yeasts can turn PET bottles and crop waste into protein for 3D printed cookies. A small cobot such as GoFa CRB 15000 could, as a possibility, run a printing head in a hospital kitchen.

A desktop 3D food printer shown by the UK Libraries Taskforce, 2017. Photo: Libraries Taskforce / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

The open problems are speed, hygiene and cost. Printing is slow next to moulding or depositing, which is why Revo uses many nozzles at once. Every part that touches food has to be easy to take apart and clean, and robots near food need hygienic designs and wash-down ratings. Recipes also have to be reformulated so the paste flows through the nozzle and still holds its shape. Factories will need staff who can write print paths and look after food safety on the same line.

A wash-down FlexPicker being sprayed clean, as food lines require. Photo: ABB

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