Inkjet-printing Good Taste

One of the hottest (and most yummy) giveaways at the Graph Expo show last week was a buttery shortbread cookie iced with the October front-cover image from Graphic Arts Monthly magazine. Basically, the baked dough is a rigid substrate that, well, crumbles a bit. Inkjet printheads move over the tasty novelties produced at Freedom Bakery & Confections (FB&C) in California.

Paul Liu, the bakery’s owner, says he had three problems with the digital inkjet printer he was using to print on cookies: It jump-started, was too slow and provided inadequate color control. So he modified a flat-bed device from a small OEM (he won’t say whose). The first machine went on line early this year and four are now in production. “We’re producing eight more,” says Liu. 

Commercially available since the early 1990s, full-color, photo-quality computer imaging on baked goods is nothing new. “But we’re not photo printing on edible rice paper,” Liu explains, like the grocery store custom cakes imaged via devices such as the Sweet Art Jet Decorator. “Our cookie product is drier and much thinner.” Plus, rice paper tends to leave a strange aftertaste and gooey texture in people’s mouths, he adds. 

Instead, FB&C images directly on its cookies and white (lemon-sugar) icing with tasteless, FDA-approved food coloring, which gets absorbed by an 8×10´´ area in about 90 seconds. That speed is more than one-third of the almost six minutes required by the older devices for the same image area.

Not a Piece of Cake

While FB&C does occasional wedding favors, the bakery is not geared toward the retail segment, Liu says. And because the firm’s primary clientele is corporate, close color matches are a must—and there were color-control problems with the old cartridges, he notes. 

“Now, we provide virtual proofs with Pantone colors for layout purposes,” Liu says. “Our non-contact printing process is a little more forgiving that ink on paper,” he adds, but the color reproduction is nonetheless impressive—no bleeding or fading. For more demanding customers, the bakery provides actual cookies for color approvals. Average cookie print runs range from 200 to 2,500. (Minimum order is 100.) “But we’ve done some national launches up to 50,000 and 100,000 cookies,” Liu reports. FB&C’s average turnaround time is seven days. 

As for the previous design’s registration issues, Liu says the 0.25" to 0.5" jump variables are okay for cakes with larger surface area, but that kind of misalignment doesn’t fly on the much smaller cookie formats. The new machines’ motion is more fluid, with no spring-loaded jerking.
Liu’s direct-to-cookie printing has another advantage not to be overlooked: With no rice paper being used in the process, there’s nothing that can peel off during shipping. On the front end, FB&C accepts high-resolution source images in any file format: EPS, PDF, JPG or TIFF.

You can read more about it on page E8 of the online Official Show Daily publication.

Side note: Check out this Latte Art Printing Machine video clip on YouTube. Inventor Oleksiy Pikalo uses a pre-owned Phillips 8155 x-y flatbed plotter that he bought on eBay. Overwhelming response led to a new company, OnLatte, Inc. What I want to know is: Is it really inkjet-printing caramelized sugar on foamed milk?