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Machine made carrots entice judges - 20th November 2023

Two young student entrepreneurs have been awarded first prize in Qatar's 'Business Incubation and Acceleration Hackathon', for coming up with a specialised 3D printer able to convert organic matter into vegetables such as carrots.

The duo, Lujain Al Mansoori and Mohammad Annan, were the recipients of roughly $6,800 prize money, intended to further develop their device and start-up business.

Although 3D printers aren't new to this field – they're employed in catering for elderly and infirm people requiring an easily digestible diet – prior to this, 3D printed food couldn't be mass produced.

What's unique in this case is the fact that ultraviolet (UV) light is utilised to set the 'ink'.

As Annan outlined, the technology adopted "supports mass production because it uses ultraviolet light. This type of printing has been done before using ultraviolet light with resin, but it's never been done before using edible material."

The innovative pair built upon 'masked stereolithography technology' which uses LED lights that shine on a specialised screen, identifying how the object should be formed. This technique allows for faster production than alternative methods.

For the printer's ink, the university students implemented a process called 'plant cell culture', where lab-harvested vegetable cells are multiplied. Adding an edible resin with sensitivity to UV light facilitates the construction of the actual food item.

With the help of LED lights, the 3D device then moulds the vegetable cells into carrot shapes, or any other form it's instructed to build. As well as being equally nutritious, the finished product works out at $2.75 per three kilograms, somewhat lower than the equivalent weight of standard carrots in Qatari stores, at $4.12.

With only a minute proportion of agricultural land, at 2.5 percent, Qatar’s heavily reliant on imports and while it's feasible for the desert terrain to be converted to arable land, costs are prohibitive. Such innovations stand to be massively beneficial.

Intent on addressing food scarcity internationally, the pair envisage a future providing printed food where it's most lacking and, as Al Mansoori says, their invention offers that possibility of making "food accessible to people all over the world".

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