Using special chocolate as material! He spent 9 years making edible 3D printing

"3D printing is something you can never finish in your lifetime." Since starting his business in college, Li Jingyuan, the founder of Shiyin Technology, and his team have spent 9 years popularizing 3D printing equipment in people's offline lives. Relying on their equipment and combining cloud technology, consumers can easily complete their own 3D printing customization using mobile phones, realizing scene interaction and technological experience.

Many people are familiar with their 3D printers. In Hangzhou and many other scenic spots in China, you can see "Panda" printers, where users can pay to print various cartoon characters and souvenirs. Different from other 3D printed products, they are lifelike and edible.

Li Jingyuan leads Shiyin Technology to continuously explore the infinite possibilities of 3D printing by cross-border research and development of food printing and promoting the integration of 3D printing with various industries.

With special chocolate

Key materials for 3D printing

At the beginning of his business, Li Jingyuan saw the market potential of 3D printing and boldly chose to cross over to food printing. "Food is the primary need of the people, and I always think that food printing is a huge market."

The road to cross-border research is not easy. In 3D printing, equipment technology is the foundation, and printing materials are the key. Without good materials, the effect of the printed product will be greatly reduced. When it comes to food printing, materials are even more important.

Taking the most popular chocolate printing material as an example, the raw materials of 3D printed chocolate and ordinary chocolate are very different. The chocolate material itself needs to have both solidification and fluidity. During the 3D printing process, it is necessary to ensure that the chocolate can be quickly solidified and formed at a certain temperature, while ensuring the fluidity of the material in the printing nozzle cavity and during the modeling process. In addition, it is also required that the material can be stored in the equipment for a certain period of time without qualitative changes.

Only on this basis can we print products that are exquisite in shape and meet food standards.

“Only with good materials can the printed things be valuable.”

The materials for 3D printed food are not only difficult to develop, but also difficult to mass produce. Different materials require different printing temperatures, which requires that each batch of chocolate printing materials must be consistent. To this end, Shiyin Technology and Tianshun Group, Asia's largest chocolate factory, jointly built a production line to cooperate in the production of oils and cocoa customized for 3D printed chocolate.

In 2019, Li Jingyuan founded Panda Technology Co., Ltd., which mainly sells self-service 3D printing equipment, including Panda 3D chocolate printers, Panda AI sugar painting printers and Panda toy 3D printers. At present, Panda 3D chocolate printers have covered nearly 70% of the provinces in the country, with more than 3,000 devices installed.

AI Sugar Painting Printer

Toy 3D Printer

Visitors can easily print

Exclusive "Souvenir"

After food 3D printing took shape, Li Jingyuan began to explore the large consumer market - the cultural tourism market. "I call it technology empowerment. Now our battle line is how to make offline cultural tourism technology experience better."

In recent years, the wave of cultural tourism consumption has emerged, and many cultural tourism scenic spots and cities have created strong IPs. In the offline product creation of cultural tourism IPs, 3D printing has a strong advantage. Compared with traditional cultural tourism scene derivative products, 3D printing does not require mold opening and factory production. Visitors can operate the printing equipment on site to make their own "souvenirs".

Relying on 3D printing technology, the content of cultural and tourism scenes can be easily customized, and the tourists' sense of scene interaction and experience is greatly improved. The different types of 3D printing equipment created by Li Jingyuan and his team have been stationed in major museums, science and technology museums, and zoos. While helping cultural and tourism scenic spots to build IP, it has also increased the growth of cultural and tourism consumption to a certain extent.

At present, the equipment installed by Shiyin Technology across the country can serve tens of thousands of people a day. The contact surface between 3D printing and ordinary people's lives continues to extend, and "technology empowering life" has become Li Jingyuan's vision.

"I hope to use new technologies to significantly improve the quality of life, allow 3D printing to enter homes, and develop the home market." Li Jingyuan's goal is to make 3D printing equipment into 3C products, so that it can enter thousands of households like home appliances.

Nine years of entrepreneurship

Once I got into it, I kept doing it.

Li Jingyuan is a new Hangzhou resident, born in the 1990s, and was admitted to the industrial design major at Zhejiang University in 2011.

Around 2010, 3D printing became popular in China, and Li Jingyuan was exposed to 3D printing during his university studies. In Li Jingyuan's words, "once I got into it, I kept doing it." In his sophomore year, Li Jingyuan formed a team with school teachers to study 3D printing, initially making 3D scanners. At that time, 3D printing was already popular abroad, but relatively vacant in China, and the market for 3D scanners was not large. In 2014, Li Jingyuan went to Singapore for exchange and study for half a year. Seeing the relatively mature 3D printing equipment abroad, he came up with the idea of ​​making his own equipment and expanding the domestic market.

In 2015, Li Jingyuan founded Shiyin Technology Co., Ltd. and served as chairman and CEO.

The initial student team was not professional and did not have much experience. The products they made were jokingly called "shoddy" by Li Jingyuan himself. Therefore, Li Jingyuan conducted social recruitment and introduced some professional talents. 2016 was a turning point in the development of Shiyin Technology. In this year, Shiyin Technology, which was once in debt, received an investment. With this investment, Li Jingyuan improved the company's R&D and management system, gradually upgraded the R&D equipment through repeated experience accumulation and iteration, and the cost was effectively controlled. After the price was reduced, the market was slowly opened up.

In 2023, Shiyin Technology's annual output value has reached 70 million yuan, and Li Jingyuan said it is expected to reach 100 million yuan this year.

Li Jingyuan has been focusing on 3D printing for nine years. His interest in 3D printing stems from his passion for innovation and challenges. He believes that 3D printing can explore infinite possibilities by combining various industries, and there will be more unexpected changes and innovations in the future. "This is a subversion of the manufacturing industry," he said.

Dialogue with the “New Youth”

Accumulated nearly 100 technical patents

Metropolis Express: What are the technical difficulties in making 3D printing equipment?

Li Jingyuan: Each process is very troublesome. There are material barriers and software barriers. You can see that we are doing a good job in some of the interactive things in front of the interface. The on-site printing process looks simple, but most printers are connected to computers, and few are directly controlled by mobile phones like us. So we are equivalent to redeveloping everything, putting the slicing engine in the cloud, and the response speed is also very fast. These are all difficult points in technology.

Metropolis Express: Are there big differences in the hardware technology of different 3D printing devices?

Li Jingyuan: Hardware is also a difficult point. The key lies in the nozzle of the equipment. For the nozzle of the equipment we print chocolate, the first point to ensure is constant temperature. The heat preservation effect must be particularly good. The second point is that the flow channel must be smooth, otherwise it will be blocked. The most feared thing is the blockage. There are many details involved. For this reason, we spent a lot of time to solve the operation and maintenance problems. In this process, we developed hundreds of patented technologies.

Domestic 3D printing equipment has market advantages

Metropolis Express: What is the current domestic and international market situation of 3D printing?

Li Jingyuan: First, the foreign market has been doing this for many years and is relatively mature, while there are relatively few people doing this in the domestic market. Second, it is very expensive abroad, but we make it cheap in China. A device that costs 400,000 yuan abroad may only cost about 100,000 yuan in China. There is a huge market space for it, and this is the advantage of our domestic production.

Metropolis Express: Does Shiyin have plans to go overseas?

Li Jingyuan: Our food 3D printer "FoodBot" that serves B-end users has been exported to more than 20 countries around the world and can print various desserts, Western food, etc.

Bringing 3D printing to every household

Metropolis Express: As an equipment manufacturing company, does Shiyin mainly engage in B-side business?

Li Jingyuan: We are also providing C-end services. For example, the “Panda” equipment we put into use is actually providing C-end services. The sales of B-end equipment is one-time, with after-sales service at most, while the C-end can be done for a long time.

Metropolis Express: How to achieve the goal of making household equipment and promoting it in the market in the future?

Li Jingyuan: First of all, consumers must generally accept the concept of 3D printing. After the production concept is popularized, we must upgrade the technology, reduce costs, and reduce the current equipment price to the price of ordinary household appliances so that every family can truly use it.