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Affordable 3-D printers have created an exciting trend in home manufacturing.
But the most revolutionary 3-D printer might be the one we keep in our kitchen.
I'm Donald Bell and in this Top 5, I'm counting down the most promising food printers.
Pulled from a list of 11, published over at www.3dprintingindustry.com.
Some are available right now and some are getting the kinks worked out.
So I ranked this list on my gut sense of they're overall commercial appeal.
Starting off at number five Fab@Home.
This open source hardware project has developed three printers capable of working with anything from cake frosting to processed cheese.
Basically anything you can shove into its syringe extruders.
It's open source so you can tinker with it pretty easily
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On the downside, for a kitchen appliance, it looks a little too open source.
At number four, the Biozoon Performance Project.
Due out in 2015, Biozoon's printer is like a molecular astronomy dream come true.
The company has made their name in high end foams and geletic texturizers
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Hm, The printer is a larger project to create tasty food for senior citizens that requires no chewing.
Intriguing idea, but I'm yet to be convinced that the world is really clambering for chicken-shaped meat pudding.
At number three,.
Choc Creator.
Now here's a food that everyone can get behind.
It does pretty much what you think, it prints in chocolate.
You can print your name, print your face, print a whole miniature version of yourself to give as a really creepy gift.
This one you can buy right now for around five grand.
Coming in at number two, Foodini.
Like the fab at home, you can print with just about any food that you can squeeze out of a tube, but this time, the design actually looks like something you'd have in your kitchen.
It's due out in the second half of 2015 for around $1,000, which I think is low enough to get some traction with experimental chefs.
Which brings us to my pick for the number one 3-D food printer.
The ChefJet.
It's a full color 3D printer that prints in sugar.
It's due out soon-ish and the ability to print shapes out of sugar obviously doesn't meet all of the requirements of the food pyramid, but the reason I'm giving it the winning slot here is that it's the only printer on this list that actually makes something that looks exciting to.
So there you go, five food printers that get us closer to the Star Trek food replicator of the future, thanks again to 3D printing and history.com for creating the original list of 11, and if you like this top five, there's a bunch more over at top5.cnet.com.
I'm Donald Bell, thanks for watching.
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