14 DAY TRIAL // Food 3D printing is serious business, but Hellmann's wanted to throw that seriousness to the curb for once, so it proceeded to set up one of the most hilarious applications of food 3D printing yet: a portrait printer that uses mayo.
Technically, calling this an application of 3D printing technology is a bit of a stretch, because the technique doesn't exactly use the standard parts (extruder, filament, pellets, paste, etc).
Instead, Hellmann's took a delta 3D printer robot setup, and instead of filament or specialized substance decanter, added a typical Hellmann's squeeze bottle for the mayonnaise to squirt out of.
The plan was to print pictures of customers on hamburgers for everyone buying one from the food truck. Speaking of which, the printer was set up in a food truck that was driven to a highly trafficked area in England.
It went like this: customers would line up to order a burger, at which point the attendant in the food truck would take a picture of said customer. The picture would be passed through intermediary software and sent to the printer.
Then, the printer would paint a caricature of the person's face on the top of the hamburger. It fell to the buyers to decide if they would add the second part of the bread bun to the burger, or leave it in view while eating.
As far as advertising tactics go, this is one for the books, because Hellmann's has definitely managed to gain attention, riding the coattails of 3D printing tech like this. The demo video has become quite viral already, raking up over 2,100 views in just a few days.
It might not sound like much, until you take into account that mayonnaise isn't exactly the sort of thing that lends itself to poplar ads. And the video is not, technically, an ad at all. Officially anyway. It still appears to draw up the faces pretty well though, despite the rough surface of the burger.
We've taken the liberty of embedding the video below. Do keep in mind that this is the first of multiple flicks planned for July and August. It shouldn't be hard to go from photos of a person's face to other pictures.
All in all, a fun (though arguably holding no weight) argument to take into account when trying to decide whether to buy Hellmann's mayo from the supermarket or some other brand. If you're looking for a way to actually 3D print your own food, though, you might want to look elsewhere, like the new extruder from RepRapBCN.
