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Sweet 3d home12/6/2023 “If you were a chef and you could pipe really carefully you could build up an object, and that’s the way they were doing it. “MIT was working on it, NASA was working on it, other huge firms - full governments, like in the Netherlands - had research projects around it, and everyone else was extruding 3-D paste, like if you had a hot glue gun,” Von Hasseln said. Von Hasseln came close to dropping out of school to pursue the printer full-time but decided to complete his degree while starting the business. Central Library to research the patent process, constantly refreshing their web browsers for months out of fear that someone else would get there first. He and his wife, Liz (who also goes by Ren), began to worry that others might beat them to market, so they headed to the downtown L.A. It was created with a mouse on a laptop, a blend of water and sugar and maltodextrin - a vegetable starch, which helps to act as a binding agent - and the 3-D printer he bought in Colorado. The first creation that made him realize he might actually have a business was a 3-D-printed sugar tiara that adorned a cupcake for his sister-in-law with her name written in cursive. He started small, printing in all-white monochrome his first shape was simple, probably a small cube. And it was beautiful: It was kind of translucent - I was using table sugar at the time - and months later I started to realize, OK, if we actually rebuilt this printer carefully to be FDA NSF certified, what would it be like to have a design firm for chefs?” “It was like a C+, while all the other materials were like a D or an F. Then he had an epiphany: “Just to be kind of cheeky, because it was inexpensive, I tried sugar and it worked pretty well,” he recalled. He laid the groundwork for his experimentation with sawdust and cement. He purchased a 3-D printer the size of a dining table, flew to Colorado to retrieve it, drove it back to California and then parked it at his house. While many 3-D-printed candies start with paste, Sugar Lab prints with fine powdered sugar - as well as dehydrated spices and vegetables - to produce treats like peppermint-flavored latte cups (which are piped with mocha chocolate later in the process) or tart lime-and-salt luchador masks that are filled with caramelized-pineapple ganache. Large-scale sugar sculptures and branded, custom treats are made for chefs and companies, while the tiniest, most dainty candy sets with themes such as holidays or Koreatown can be purchased on the company’s website. Instead, there’s a small team of architects, designers and chefs who tinker with sugar sculptures and recipes, building with modded and food-safe 3-D printers that are more typically used for metalworking. You won’t encounter a top-hatted candy magnate at Sugar Lab, a 3-D-printing confectionery where science meets sweets. Tiny truffles, sugar cubes and dissolving drink additions that can infuse a cocktail with glitter and bitters are being built seemingly out of thin air, one layer at a time in whirring machines that create intricate, edible, colorful candies. There’s something Willy Wonka-esque happening in an industrial studio at the edge of Lincoln Heights.
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