(inspirational music)
- [Kyle] Welcome to Sugar Lab,
we're in the arts district in downtown Los Angeles.
I'm Kyle von Hasseln.
- I'm Megan Bozeman.
- I'm William Hu.
- And we're co-founders of Sugar Lab,
and we create 3D printed food experiences.
We created Sugar Lab over 10 years ago,
when we invented a new kind of 3D printer,
that prints with dehydrated food powders.
It's been our brainchild since then,
our labor of love, and we're proud to share it
We 3D print with real food.
Everything that we print with
is something that a chef would source
and it's all edible and safe to eat.
3D printing with food is incredible,
because it does a couple things really, really well.
It creates food in incredible precision.
We 3D print with a lot of geometric corners
and symmetry that aren't able to be done by hand
- You can do things with 3D printed food
that compliment traditional but also do things that
are not even possible.
One of the challenges with 3D printed food is
that people have never had it before.
It's been a fun challenge to figure
out what we should offer to people.
- [William] Alright, now let's go upstairs
to check out the design process.
So this is the strawberry bon bon.
We sketched it out first,
and now I'm just roughing out the shape of it.
And then now I'm gonna start placing the seeds,
and we can do this really precisely on the software.
We love that our food can look like
the actual that we're designing.
And also we can play off of that,
by changing the whole experience of
actually eating that fruit.
And that's important to us because
this is already a new product,
and we wanted to make it super familiar,
but also change that experience
which people weren't really expecting.
- And now we have a kitchen out here where
chef Victoria does magic.
- Hi, my name is Victoria Rose Johnson,
I am the kitchen manager and resident pastry chef here.
I have so much fun, I get to make incredible things,
and beautiful things at that.
When I was younger, I used to love baking cakes,
and that led to me going to
the culinary Institute of America.
I landed here, and now this is what I get to do. (laughs)
I have always been interested in the decorating aspect
and there are limitations when it comes
to making things out of fondant and buttercream,
but there are no limitations here.
And it's absolutely amazing.
One of my favorites is our love and hex potions.
These are glitter bombs, which are absolutely amazing.
The process for printing.
It absolutely has to begin with
measuring out all of your ingredients.
What I'm about to make is our kimchi bouillon.
One of our savory items that we make
I'm gonna start with our neutral powders.
This is the one that doesn't have any additional flavor.
It basically tastes very similar to powdered sugar.
Next, I know this looks exactly the same
but it is actually our lime powder.
One of my favorite parts is our
beautiful, beautiful gochugaru.
We have to make it super, super fine
so that there's no chance that the particle size is too big.
It could fail a print if the particle size were too big,
or it wouldn't spread right in the printer,
which of course is no fun for anybody.
Next, here, I have celery salt that helps bring
in that green flavor that you,
you aren't gonna get with powdered sugar.
And then last but not least, is our regular salt,
again you'll find super, super fine.
All of those get mixed into a big bowl
that then gets brought over to the printer.
When we're ready to sift into the printer.
I start by finding the correct file on the
little computer that's attached to the printer.
I make sure I heighten the feed and the build bed.
Now the feed bed is where the powder is gonna go
before it starts printing.
And the build bed is where the powder is going to end up.
It moves from one to the other, and that's
that's basically part of the printing process.
So I will pull it up right here,
and I will get these to their right heights.
And then we're ready to go.
It is a weird feeling that most
of my job as a chef is playing with technology.
And yes, it is always this messy.
After I have everything sifted in,
I gotta make sure that all those little loose particles
that got around the edges get into the print itself.
Now we gotta grab the tamper.
I like doing the little tap at the end to get
all of the excess off.
Now we're gonna have to smooth this guy out.
So let's bring these up to the right height.
This is gonna pull the powder across and make that
really nice flat top so that we have a good printing base.
And of course, while the base itself is a sugar mixture
it gets bound with a water based ink
similar to how you would use food coloring and other things.
And there she is, flat be one ready for printing.
(calm music)
When I go to excavate, I essentially
push down the feed bed,
which is where the powder came from.
And I push up the build bed just a little bit,
so I have access to the parts.
Next, I just grab them.
So we of course, really, really carefully pull them out.
And we set them up on these little trays here.
So this blue is gonna come out really, really
gorgeous when we de-powder, which is a fun little machine.
It's extremely loud which is really convenient for
singing songs when I'm alone in the kitchen
It is not however convenient when I'm singing songs
really loud in the kitchen,
and don't hear my coworkers walk through the door. (laughs)
They're all ready to go after that.
These have a nice neutral flavor,
and they are blue toned.
It's not the only color that we do.
We also do an orange ombre, as well as
some other beautiful rainbow cubes.
These are most commonly used in tea or coffee.
Anything you want just a little bit sweeter.
Neutral is not the only flavor we make.
We also do things like watermelon lemonade, and lime.
We do things as crazy as Mexican hot chocolate and cinnamon.
- Mmm.
It's not as sweet as I thought it would be,
which is really nice.
I think it's like a refreshing level of sweetness.
- So these are the strawberry covered chocolate truffles.
They have an incredible ginger shell.
The red one is filled with a caramelized honey and chili.
Then we also have the pink one here
which is a tamarind elderflower.
And then the last one here is our white one,
and it is a pineapple upside down cake.
These are some of my favorites.
They're the original recipes that we made,
very, very, very beginning.
I am getting ready to fill here.
I've got my ganache.
I've got my little truffles over here.
We make a ton of different truffles.
The flavor I have here is tamarind elderflower.
All of the ganache gets made in house.
Each one of these is hand filled by me.
- Cheers.
Mmm, you guys have to try this.
The shell, every time I think it's gonna break my teeth.
It doesn't, it's so soft.
Got the perfect bite.
- Oddly enough, our best seller
is one of our savory items that we make.
And it is our kimchi bouillon, which is an absolutely
wonderful recipe that we make that ends
up tasting like kimchi.
And you can put it in your ramens,
a million different things you can do with it.
So, it's both surprising
and not surprising that it's our top seller.
- Mmm!
It tastes like elevated cup noodles.
- [Kyle] There's so many great memories
over the course of the last decade with Sugar Lab,
we've had a ton of really special projects that came to us
from excited chefs who wanna make something super custom,
or even just from people all across the country
are who are hosting birthday parties, get togethers.
We have a custom wedding line.
We also make cake toppers for weddings,
and they're super cool.
We work with bakers locally here in LA.
And one of the really neat things we can do is
3D scan a bride or groom and render them
in 3D and then 3D print it directly into sugar,
and you have your own likeness in the 3D printed sugar.
It's made from our friends over at Action Phase.
They have an iPhone app, you download it,
and 3D scan yourself, and then send us the file,
and we get it 3D printed.
Speaking of figurines, we made one of you, Jasmine.
- (gasps) Oh my gosh!
It's me.
This is the coolest thing I've ever seen.
Let's eat it.
Cheers.
Mmm.
It tastes like cake with the texture of merengue.
This is crazy.
All that hard work the printer did, and I'm just eating it.
This is the neutral one.
So it tastes like sugar, and it's really nicely flavored
- [Kyle] At the end of the day,
we all love food and we wanted 3D printed food
to be a part of everyone's life.
(classic music)