Audio Article | Adapting Additive Manufacturing at Novameat

Based on an interview with Miquel Turón Viñas

As the environmental and dietary impacts of the traditional meat industry continue to attract concern, plant-based meat manufacturers seek to provide viable alternatives. One emerging alternative involves three-dimensional (3D) printing. 

A company leading this charge is Barcelona-based food tech startup Novameat,  which pioneered using syringes in 3D printers in 2018 to create a unique, textured meat substitute from plant-based pastes and natural ingredients that absorb flavors while cooking in order to stay true to the taste and nutrients. Now, Novameat produces these products via their own manufacturing facility and those of their food manufacturing partners to supply food distributors throughout Europe. However, even while many other companies have followed suit by using large 3D printing machines throughout their processes, Novameat has changed course—a change that could eventually contribute to eradicating world hunger. 

“The advantage of 3D printers is that they are versatile,” explains Miquel Turón Viñas, the company’s director of technology innovation. “But we quickly found that flexibility alone was not enough for us to adapt to an industrial scale. We knew we needed to do something different.” 

Miquel Turón Viñas is a technology innovator with a background in industrial design  and a PhD in materials science and engineering. As Director of Technology Innovation at Novameat, he leads the development of next-generation food technologies on an industrial scale. Driven by a commitment to innovation, sustainability, and ethical progress, Miquel applies scientific expertise and strategic vision to create impactful solutions for a better food future.  

Striking a Balance 

For Turón Viñas, this shift started with an epiphany. “We were trying to adapt 3D printing technology to an industrial scale,” he recalls. “To match the needs of our partners, we needed to be able to maintain an industrial schedule with high throughput. Unfortunately, while 3D printers are flexible, they are also slow—generally too slow to maintain an industrial schedule. And, in an industrial process, did we really need the full flexibility of this technology, or did we need it only at certain stages?”

Turón Viñas and his team were also concerned about the ease with which their partners could implement whatever tools they chose. “Other companies were building these big, complex machines that were expensive and hard to use and asking their partners to buy them,” he says. “Nobody wanted to buy them. We realized that ease of implementation had to be factored into our solution.”
“That was when we had a realization,” Turón Viñas remembers. “Our solution had to balance flexibility with high throughput, affordability, and ease of implementation.” 

Leveraging Strengths, Easing Implementation

Over the past several years, this focus led to a novel combination of 3D printing and conventional food manufacturing. Developing such a solution started with finding the right place for additive manufacturing in Novameat’s process.

“We soon realized that we could best leverage the strengths of 3D printing at the beginning of our process, in prototyping and testing,” Turón Viñas says. “We created prototypes in very small batches with very small amounts of ingredients. In one morning, our three 3D printers could create twenty to thirty iterations. We would test them with our panel of culinary experts, identify the best ones, and then start outfitting our large-scale machines to produce them en masse.” 

The 3D printers’ flexibility enabled the team to experiment, while creating these iterations, with a broad range of textures and ingredients to approximate the feel of organic meat with a high degree of fidelity. To support this innovation, Novameat developed its own microextrusion texturization technology—enabling the precise control of fiber size and orientation required to recreate the structure of real meat.“

The size and orientation of muscle fibers is a big part of what makes meat feel like meat,” Turón Viñas explains. “So, we experimented with the sizes of fibers and how they are oriented. For example, meat fibers are not arranged in a square net—they tend to be positioned orthogonally. Therefore, we tried different orientations, shapes, and sizes and considered how they might be stacked on top of one another to get the most realistic, natural result.”

Next, rather than building costly industrial-scale machines to manufacture their products, Turón Viñas and his team focused on adapting existing commercial equipment commonly used throughout the industry and staying close to familiar processes. “This is much faster,” he says. “You bring your adaptations and devices to a partner that already has the machine, without requiring much training. With a small investment, they are ready to go.”

Growing Possibilities

With this winning model in place and Novameat expanding its products to companies across Europe, Turón Viñas envisions many possibilities. “Implementing in these established industries is fairly easy,” he says. Applying Novameat’s microextrusion technology to manufacturing processes in these established industries enables partners to integrate high-quality plant-based meat production without a complete equipment overhaul. As Turón Viñas explains, “They don’t need to have a big investment or spend millions to adapt, and the ability to use any kind of protein in our machines removes yet another barrier.”

This latter capability, Turón Viñas says, opens the door for some intriguing possibilities as Novameat expands into regions with differing food supplies and scarcity. “Wherever we go, we can make use of local proteins,” he explains. “We can also tailor the product to a specific nutritional profile. For instance, you can choose to enhance your plant-based meat with vitamin B, vitamin D, or more fat. You can ensure that it delivers the ideal calorie-to-nutrient ratio or protein intake.”

Best of all, Novameat’s approach delivers these benefits while cutting its environmental impact to a fraction of what comparable operations generate. “According to recent numbers, raising and processing 1kg of standard beef can result in 20kg to 60kg of CO2,” Turón Viñas says. “In contrast, our process produces only 1.4kg of CO2 per kilogram of meat. In terms of water usage, we use 99 percent less water than is used in producing chicken or beef. In terms of energy usage, our process consumes only 3kW to 5kW versus the 60kW to 200kW consumed in traditional processes.”

Conclusion

If Novameat’s solution grows to fruition and its product becomes available in more markets over the next several years, Turón Viñas envisions a host of even more impactful applications. He foresees the ability to provide personalized food options to people based on their dietary needs (e.g., allergies and health issues). He anticipates the ability to tackle world hunger head-on by providing affordable, nutrient-balanced food options in poverty-stricken regions and delivering them without the need for refrigeration.

Ultimately, however, Turón Viñas expects these efforts to succeed because of his team’s decision to work in cooperation with—rather than in opposition to—established companies in the industry: “Rather than trying to disrupt an industry and potentially bankrupt companies, as often happens in technology, we have chosen to make this transition smooth and easy to implement for them. We have chosen to partner with them rather than replace them.”