Move over Willy Wonka, the automation has begun and your services will no longer be required. Take your oompa-loompas with you, they’ve always freaked me out so good riddance from my side.

A candy store in Berlin is the first in the world to offer 3D printed candy to its customers, and look how delighted those kids look in the video above. I didn’t see many shots of their parents, no doubt reeling from the prices. Here’s Inverse:

Novelty fruit gummies don’t come cheap: The candies, printed in a dozen shapes, will cost you $5 a pop. Or, for $11 a word, you can write out the names of your enemies, and find solace in the fact that, over the next 20 hours, your body will turn their sugary effigies to waste.

The Magic Candy Factory is located at Cafe Gruen Ohr and many believe this is just the beginning when it comes to food production. Take for example the Foodini, a machine that débuted late last year and was covered by CNN:

The “Foodini,” as it’s called, isn’t too different from a regular 3D printer, but instead of printing with plastics, it deploys edible ingredients squeezed out of stainless steel capsules…

In principle, the Foodini sounds like the ultimate laziness aid: press a button to print your ravioli. But Natural Machines is quick to point out that it’s designed to take care only of the difficult and time-consuming parts of food preparation that discourage people from cooking at home, and that it promotes healthy eating by requiring fresh ingredients prepared before printing.

Then there’s the Cultivator, designed by two German students:

[It was developed] as a concept for how middle-class individuals and small families could generate smaller portions of meat right in their own kitchen. The meat created would not appear as familiar pieces most people know (like chicken breasts or slabs of steak), but as shapes designed for efficiency while retaining flavor and nutrients. The machine would also conform to the sustainable energy needs of the future by using solar panels for power…

Users basically use the onscreen interface to select what kind of meat they’re looking for. After selecting flavor, recipe, and serving size, they can choose to modify other characteristics such as cholesterol, fat, calcium, and other nutrients, according to individual needs. The machine than starts to build the meat by adding layers of artificially synthesized organic cells, layer by layer. As the “bioink” comes together, a slab of meat forms. That meat — if used correctly — gets cooked.

Who knows what the hell we’ll be eating in 20 years time and where it will come from, although if it means the end of factory farming it may be worth a bash.

[sources:inverse&cnn&inverse]