A restaurant that serves your face to eat

Real-time printing to apply to food is a growing trend in the world of gastronomy

A few years ago, David Weiss went through an episode of self-reflection in his career. He was working as a sales representative for a sweater wholesaler in New York City and found the job unsatisfying.

So in the end, he did what many of us dream of doing when a career stagnant period hits – he quit and traveled the world.

“I had a year’s salary in the bank, so I said: ‘I’m leaving here'”, he said in a telephone interview.

And he left. For the next year and a half, Weiss spent time in Israel, Indonesia and Thailand, and it was in the latter country that he would find the ticket for what would be his next trip.

Weiss was on a three-day silent meditation retreat in northern Thailand when he met his future business partner, a chiropractor named Farsh Kanji. Like Weiss, Kanji had retired from his previous business and was traveling the world. They finally met, and luckily for both of them, their meditation wasn’t exactly silent.

Instead, they began to talk about an idea that would become the focus of their future company: printing faces on food.

Real-time facial printing

Weiss and Kanji knew that the technology for printing photos on food already existed. For example, there were already online services that could print your loved one on a cake and send it to your home in a few days. What they wanted to do is dig deeper into this idea by allowing people to take photos and print their image on food at events in real time.

From there, it wasn’t long before they got down to business. The first thing they knew they had to do was discover the technology for printing on food.

“We had some friends who understood printing technology”Weiss said. To work with food, they explored modifying an ink printer and printing with food coloring.

It worked and Selffee was born. Before long, they were bringing technology to events. But in those early days, they still had to solve the problems. At one event, they wanted to print a cookie for one of the first Instagram executives, only the image they printed was the wrong colors and too big to fit on the cookie.

They fine-tuned the process, and today they can print on thousands of cookies, drinks, or even marshmallows in a single event. For a typical compromise, Weiss says they’ll bring three printers and be able to batch print 18 or more cookies in about five minutes. For larger events, they have discovered how they can print thousands of edibles printed with customers’ faces.

“We did the 2018 Super Bowl and made about 60,000 faces on the marshmallows.”said Weiss last year.

In 2018, Selffee worked on more than 300 events. The company also has seven full-time employees and plans to expand globally in 2019 by moving to five markets in Europe.

Source: Forbes and The Observer (interviews)