Nestec, the R&D arm of food giant Nestlé, has developed an edible ink that could expand the use of inkjet printing in the food and medical industry.
- Smarties – one of several foodstuffs used in the development of a new edible ink
The company has filed for a patent for an inkjet printing process for printing on solid foods with edible inks, with the innovation having already tested on Nestlé’s well-known confectionary Smarties brand.
Nestlé is one of only a few companies in the food industry that already utilises inkjet printing when producing its various products, with many having opted against the method as it often requires the use of undesirable materials such as ethanol and glycerol in order to support water-based inks. According Nestlé, the key factor behind the new process is that it only uses ingredients that consumers are familiar with – thus eliminating any concerns over what is actually in the food they are eating.
The process may be used to apply colours, patterns, images, logos or text to provide information about the nature of the material, for example to identify pharmaceutical tablets; or to decorate the material and make it more attractive, for example to print a cartoon character on a confectionery item, or to print a message on a paper wrapper surrounding a chocolate praline. The process of the invention provides good resolution of the images printed.
Nestle projected a printing resolution from 150 dots per inch (dpi), to 500 dpi. As with printing on any substrate, the maximum resolution for the process of the invention is governed by other factors such as the design of the inkjet head, the ink composition and substrate. Foods used during the experimentation included Smarties, white chocolate and biscuits, while the printer used was a FujiFilm Dinnatix DMP-2831.
Ink compounds were developed with varying percentages of different sugars (fructose, sucrose and glucose) and sweeteners based not on their flavour, but on their behaviour as a pigment carrier. In their research, the pigment used was Annato, an edible organic food additive derived from a tropical shrub.
Speaking about inkjet printing on a wider scale, Nestlé praised the process and what it can potentially do for the food industry as a whole.
