Additive Manufacturing applications within food industry: An actual overview and future opportunities

The food sector is one of the major economic sectors in Europe and beyond and produces nutrition for the world population. Food industry has a unique role in all countries economy as it is essential to people lives. In Europe it is the largest manufacturing sector in terms of value added, turnover and employment. On the other hand, several worldwide economic-social-technological trends are pushing organizations to embrace innovation as an integrated part of their corporate strategy, and to offer customized products tailored to market targets need. Embracing innovation became strategic in order to create a sustainable competitive advantage and to stay ahead of the competition in every industry, even in food one. Today, among all the most cutting-edge technologies, Additive Manufacturing (AM) has the potential to develop business paradigms to face an ever changing demand. AM comprises a group of technologies whose initial inception occurred over thirty years, characterized by a layer upon layer production directly from Computer-Aided Design (CAD) data. Over the past few years AM development has increased exponentially and has expanded to include new areas of research. Within all the innovative applications, one of the most promising under respect of social impacts and progress, has proved to be the technological application in the food industry. This scientific work aims at finding out potential touching points between additive manufacturing technologies and food market, either consumer and industrial, focusing on the actual and future applications.