Startup of the Month: Natural Machines

Lynette Kucsma, co-founder and chief marketing officer, Natural Machines

Natural Machines is the company behind Foodini, the 3D food printer. Foodini is a new generation kitchen appliance that combines technology, food, art and design, and allows you to print real food using fresh ingredients. It manages the difficult and time-consuming parts of food preparation that often discourage people from creating homemade food, such as ravioli, or even more intricate creations that are hard to achieve by hand.

Foodini has room for up to five food capsules. First, prepare the ingredients and place the mixture in the capsules. Then, pick one of the existing designs—or your own—and start printing. So, if you’re printing iced cookies, for example, you would place the cookie dough in one capsule and the icing in another capsule, rather than the individual raw ingredients.

Currently, we’re only working with professional kitchen clients. This includes Michelin-starred restaurants, catering companies and even a few hospitals. Some top chefs, such as Miramar’s Paco Pérez and Joel Castanyé at La Boscana, are using Foodini to create special dishes and to boost innovation in their kitchens. We currently have interest from more than 90 countries.

The next generation of devices will not only print food, but actually cook it too. We wanted to develop a multi-functional device before trying to break into the consumer market. As a mother of two young kids, I know that both space and time in our kitchens are limited, which is why we want to help people to prepare food from scratch. Take something like crackers: the dough is easy to make, but what’s difficult is finding a clean work surface and rolling it out. If you just make the dough and print it, then the job is done.

There’s one picture that I always show when I’m presenting Natural Machines: a dinosaur-shaped spinach quiche. I had tried (and failed) to get my kids to eat spinach, but when we prepared the quiche ingredients and printed them in dinosaur shapes, they ate it all up!

I used to live in New York, working in fashion and advertising. I first got involved in the technology industry in the Nineties, although my background was in marketing it and finding a real-life usage for it, rather than building it. My co-founder, on the other hand, is an engineer who is fluent in Chinese. I was introduced to him through my husband, and found that we both had a strong ethos regarding healthy, fresh food, which has brought us to where we are today.

We just crossed the five-year mark as a startup, which is a great milestone. We currently have a team of 10 people working full time, together with a constant flow of interns. We’ve got everything from software and hardware engineers to food tech professionals. I always recommend that entrepreneurs find themselves a co-founder because there is no way you can do it all by yourself. Look for somebody different from you, somebody with complementary skills—that’s super important.

Learn more about Natural Machines at naturalmachines.com.