[Blog] Startups on the rise

3mins, 5 questions!

That’s all it takes to find out about 3D printed food for personalised nutrition. Anirudh Agarwal, Founder of Anrich 3D – Singapore-based 3D food printing firm, tells us more. 

Q1. What is your startup about?

Food 3D Printing for personalized nutrition. Take fresh, natural, healthy ingredients; make them into paste and extrude them out layer-wise to make 3D shapes. When we do that with multiple materials, we can control the amount of every ingredient and get an optimized balanced meal, personalized to the requirements of every individual.

3D printing also allows for flexibility in shape and configuration. The same optimized meals can be served in visually appealing and appetizing shapes and desired configurations like a pizza form or as bite-sized snacks.

Q2. Impact! What is the impact of your product/service?

3D printing is a new tool that unlocks the creative potential of chefs, dieticians, athletic trainers, food scientists and more to create new and precise food configurations that were never possible before.

Personalized nutrition can be used in:

1. Hospitals and care facilities as an insurance against medical complications that may arise due to sub-optimal nutrition.
2. Gyms and training centers for actors, models and athletes to optimize diet with training schedule.

Visually appealing shapes can be used for:

1. Getting kids to eat healthier by printing nutritious veggies in fun shapes.
2. Getting the elderly or dysphagia patients to eat more of the soft diet improving the total nutrition received.
3. Personalized novel meals, snacks and desserts for caterers and in high end hotels and restaurants.

Food 3D printing can also be used to help create alternative meats by:

1. Printing the scaffolding for cells to grow
2. Printing vegan analogues of blood, muscle, fat etc. to emulate the animal anatomy

Anrich3D is building a general-purpose industrial machine. We want to offer the platform for food scientists, dieticians, healthcare professionals, chefs and food connoisseurs to explore possibilities with this new tool together and create the next revolution in food technology!

Q3. What are you looking for to grow your startup?

We need research funding and collaborations with healthcare providers and companies that offer personalized nutrition advice. Anrich3D is building a tool to implement nutritional requirements (given in ingredient amounts) into physical meals or snacks. With an initial funding of 300k SGD, we should be able to develop machines for selling the food and start the revenue flow.

Q4. What is your motivation for success?

Diet is the most important part of health. Information on personalized nutrition is readily available. The hardest part about diet is not the information, but the implementation – calculating the right amount of ingredients and measuring them.

If that part is automated with 3D printed food, personalized nutrition becomes a lot more accessible to a lot more people. Healthier people are more productive. We may just unlock the full potential of humanity with 3D printed personalized nutrition!

Q5. What characteristics do you think you possess that will help your startup succeed?

My long-term determination to stick with the vision has brought Anrich3D this far: from an idea to several phases of prototypes, to a version that is truly capable of multi-material printing.

My adaptability in the face of varied customer demands has allowed me to pivot and come up with more robust business models over time with more revenue streams, based on the the same underlying technology.

As the founder of the only food 3D printing company in Singapore, developing a machine on the cutting-edge speaks volumes about my ability to innovate quickly.