Metal 3D Printing is Spicing Up Food & Beverage Equipment

Desktop Metal has compiled the top 5 reasons we see the food and beverage industry moving to metal 3D printing. While mentions of 3D printing for food may bring to mind chocolate extruded into cool decorative shapes, additive manufacturing is actually transforming the industry behind the scenes – making food and beverage processing equipment safer, more productive, and delivering all-new innovations to the nearly $60 billion industry.

If you’ve ever watched an episode of “How it’s Made” on Discovery TV, you’ve seen the complexity of cleaning, cutting, mixing, swirling, layering, stretching, shaping, or molding of food or beverages in solid, semi-solid, or liquid states. And that’s all before they get packaged by complex assembly lines that often resemble a Rube Goldberg machine.

In all, the food and beverage industry is a symphony of hundreds of thousands of complex mechanical parts and assemblies that perform tasks that must also meet strict standards for quality and sanitization. Metal parts, often made of stainless steel, are an industry standard material for that safety reason.

But making and shaping all of those complex metal parts comes with challenges, and this is where 3D printing, also known as additive manufacturing, offers value-added solutions. Building parts layer-by-layer eliminates many limitations of CNC machining and other traditional metal manufacturing approaches and offers increased design flexibility as well as numerous other benefits to food and beverage processing equipment manufacturers.

Desktop Metal, a leader in accessible metal 3D printing technology working with the food and beverage industry, has compiled the following top reasons they see the food and beverage industry moving to metal 3D printing: