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OnLatte demonstrates its beer, coffee foam printer
No matter how safe you think your job is, the march of progress can eventually replace you with a computer.
For years, elite café baristas from Cambridge to California have decorated the creamy heads of espresso drinks with traces of foam drawn in patterns like a leaf, a heart, even a ring of hearts. Now a company from Cambridge is waiting in the wings of history with a hacked inkjet printer the founders say can do the job better.
If bootstrapped OnLatte Inc. lives up to the hopes of founders Josh Grob, 29, and Oleksiy Pikalo, 31, the invention will be printing images in caramelized sugar on the foam atop lattes and cappuccinos at every Starbucks Corp. (Nasdaq: SBUX) coffee shop in the land.
“You go into a Starbucks. They want to promote the latest movie they’re a part of. They can print that on your latte,” he said. “Or you can have your own art — your own image that you want on top of your latte. That can be stored on your customer card so when you swipe your card it appears on your drink.”
The patent-pending technology, developed by Pikalo, is currently being deployed on a repurposed 1980s-era Kodak inkjet assembly affixed to the guts of a flat-panel scanner.
Award-winning latte artist Simon Yu, who owns Simon’s Coffee Shop in Cambridge, sounded skeptical. “To me, the latte art should more be the touch of the hand,” said Yu. “Still,” he admitted, “I’m a little bit curious how it comes out in the machine.”
So far, Grob and Pikalo have demonstrated it on hot beverages served during a recent biotech trade show at the Millipore Corp. (NYSE: MIL) booth. “I’d like to get them into a bigger show,” said Elaine Fitzpatrick, corporate events specialist at the Billerica biotech company. “It does create a buzz, and that’s what you’re looking for.”
New England is also the home of the Dimatix Technology Integration unit of FujiFilm Dimatix Inc. The Lebanon, N.H.-based company last year came out with a proprietary inkjet printer for printing fine, edible designs on nearly any food product.
Without a giant parent like Fuji-Film, Grob said OnLatte needs at least a $200,000 investment to design and build a machine that could be sold to coffee shops. If that happens, he hopes to create a different kind of buzz as well, using the technology to create patterns atop creamy-headed beers like Guinness.
He’s already received e-mail inquiries from interested publicans in Moldova, Russia, Macedonia, Estonia and Australia, Grob said.
“Beer is going to be just as good as lattes, we think, especially the Guinness,” he said. “Anything with a thicker head to it is going to be prime.”
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