Israeli Inventors Create 3D-Printed Veggie Burgers

Oded Shoseyov, a professor of plant molecular biology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, recently created Chef-It—a machine that prints and cooks veggie burgers on demand. The machine is loaded with plant-based ingredients such as cellulose, proteins, fats and seasoning, and outputs a vegan patty that is cooked with infrared light. The professor and his team began developing the prototype—which can currently print and cook a veggie burger in 10 minutes—in 2013 after receiving a $282,000 investment from the Israeli government’s food technology and innovation fund. Shoseyov is currently raising $2 million in funding to help him get Chef-It—which the team is tweaking to reduce output time to three minutes—into fast-food restaurants to replace meat burgers. Last week, Israel-based company Aleph Farms announced that it developed a 3D-platform for clean meat—also known as “cultured meat” grown from a small sample of animal cells in a laboratory setting—making it possible to print slaughter-free alternatives to steak.