Personalized nutrition has gained popularity over the years due to the increasing awareness of the health benefits of a personalized diet. Based on individual-specific information, a personalized nutritional advice can be given describing the nutritional requirements. This, however, is only the first part of the challenge. The main challenge is determining the selection and amount of ingredients from which a personalized product is made so that it matches with the personalized nutritional advice. When only a few nutritional values and ingredients are involved manually matching the advice is easy, but when the amount of nutritional values and ingredients increases this becomes sheer impossible.
 | 4 December 2024 |  |
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3D food printing is uniquely suited for creating personalized food products. With 3D food printing a personalized product can be made by printing a product out of several different formulations. Each formulation will be extruded through a nozzle, similar to Fused Filament Fabrication (FFF) used in Additive Manufacturing (AM), to build a personalized product in a layer-by-layer fashion. Each formulation is designed to have a specific known nutritional content while adhering to all the boundary conditions necessary for 3D food printing.
The goal of our IMAGINE project is to go from a personalized nutritional advice to a fully personalized printed food product having the specified nutritional values. For this, we have created a mathematical model that is capable of solving an N-dimensional optimization problem that determines the optimal ingredient distribution to best match a given nutritional advice.
A presentation by Dolf Klomp, Senior Scientist at TNO.
What drives Dolf!
He is driven by realizing new conceptual 3D Food Printing ideas in reality, and he sees 3D Food Printing and Artificial Intelligence as emerging technology.
About Dolf Klomp
Dolf Klomp has been working in the field of 3D food printing for almost a decade as part of the department of Equipment for Additive Manufacturing at TNO. He did his PhD on the topic of “Particle flow analysis for multi-material 3D food printing” which was also the title of his thesis. He specializes in the optimization of 3D food printing processes, based on his knowledge of statistics, mathematical modeling and overall software architecture.
About TNO
TNO; Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research, is an independent Dutch research organization based in Netherlands focused on research in applied science. Targeted innovation is what we stand for. We develop knowledge not for its own sake, but for the betterment of society.
The unit Equipment for Additive Manufacturing focusses on innovative 3D printing technologies for use in the food and pharma domains and has been active in the 3D printing field for over a decade. Over this period, TNO has built a distinctive position in the food world by developing series of state of the art printers that reach beyond the capabilities of commercially available printers. Our core competence lies in the knowledge of technology, process engineering, and design and engineering of the equipment.
For more information, visit the website.
Dolf Klomp is speaker at the 2023 edition of the Agrifood Innovation Event.