Tokyo Restaurant Offers 3D-Printed Sushi Tailored to Your Health Needs

A new Tokyo restaurant called Sushi Singularity offers 3D-printed sushi that's “hyper-personalized” to each guest's health and nutrient needs. Scheduled to open this year, this restaurant by Open Meals (a Japanese company dedicated to facilitating a new food revolution) aims to revolutionize sushi by digitizing its ingredients, designs, and flavors. In addition to the restaurant's alternative method to food preparation, guests are required to submit biological samples (via a health test kit) when making a reservation. Biometric and DNA data gathered from these custom kits will inform a personalized nutrient infusion. The encoded sushi, customized to each guest's nutrient needs, is then artfully produced by 3D printers and laser technology.

This futuristic dining experience will soon be commonplace, maintains Open Meals. Sushi Singularity is an attempt to “break away from conventional concepts of food.” The food fabrication machines, food operation system, and health identification employed by the cutting-edge restaurant will eventually be smaller and available to general consumers. Open Meals has been pursuing the digitization of food for years, making quite an impression with their Sushi Teleportation demonstration at SXSW in 2018. As the world's first data food transmission model, it opened up many minds to the idea of downloadable food.

This culinary digitization will require immense collaborative and technological efforts. According to Open Meals, food must first be encoded with complex algorithms that account for texture, taste, heat, smell, etc. Then, these encoded dishes must be made available online, through a platform entitled Foodbase. Lastly, anyone wishing to create a downloadable dish must have the correct “ingredients” in 3D printing format. While Sushi Singularity may be the first restaurant of its kind, the scientists have been 3D printing flesh and other biological materials for some time. These technologies are now making their way into the restaurant industry, offering new potential for customization on a micro level.

Much of Open Meal's projects are grounded in traditional Japanese culinary tradition. The fusion of futuristic technology and tradition can create biometric-optimized sushi. Open Meals also creates Wagashi, a traditional delicacy created to reflect nature, by encoding weather data and 3D printing this data with a food fabrication machine. Check out these projects and more on Open Meal's website.