Podcast: Edible Robots Bring Tech to the Dessert Table

In this episode, we explore the innovative fusion of robotics and culinary arts through the creation of RoboCake—an edible robotic wedding cake developed by researchers from EPFL and discuss how this project is pushing the boundaries of food technology, introducing edible robots powered by consumable batteries, and opening new possibilities for interactive and sustainable gastronomic experiences.

This podcast is sponsored by Mouser Electronics. 

Episode Notes

(3:00) - Robotics meets the culinary arts

This episode was brought to you by Mouser, our favorite place to get electronics parts for any project, whether it be a hobby at home or a prototype for work. Click HERE to learn more about the rise of soft robotics in applications like 3D printing, rescue missions, and more!

Become a founding reader of our newsletter: http://read.thenextbyte.com/

Transcript

Imagine you slice into a wedding cake only to find it dancing back at you. Does that make you morally question what you're doing? Well, it doesn't make me morally question it. I'm excited to just get into that dancing teddy bear. And that's exactly what these folks over at EPFL are cooking up. They're making chocolate and candy that can dance with batteries that are composed of completely edible items. So, if that's got your sweet tooth craving going on a craze, then I guess gear up and let's bite into this.

What's up friends, this is The Next Byte Podcast where one gentleman and one scholar explore the secret sauce behind cool tech and make it easy to understand.

Farbod: Folks, like you heard, this is gonna be a sweet, sweet episode of The Next Byte. And I'm gonna be honest, it's a totally selfish one. We love technology, we love cooking, and this one just brought it all together. Is it gonna change the world? Maybe not. But we like it. And if we like it, you probably like it. So, I guess let's just get into it. But before we do, let's talk about today's sponsor. And that's gonna be Mouser Electronics. Folks, if you've been rocking with us for a minute, you know we love working with Mouser. And the reason for that is that they have the same mentality as us. There's a lot of cool things happening in industry and academia, and a lot of folks just don't know about it. The STEM topics, they can be overly complicated at times, but we're trying to do the same thing as Mouser, and that is expressing it in ways that make sense for everyone. Mouser has these technical resources and we're going to be linking one of the show notes that's super relevant today. This one is called the rise of soft robotics. They're talking about the background and what soft robotics are, how they've been revolutionizing the world of machinery and automation by allowing these flexible park pickers and things like that to safely handle sensitive materials and interact with human beings. And really how even on the manufacturing side, 3D printing is adopting so that it can accommodate more of these soft materials for robotic applications. They go then into agriculture and healthcare and where these things are being deployed. So, if this realm is of interest to you, soft robotics materials, highly recommend that you check it out because I actually found it to be a very solid primer for this article.

Daniel: Well, and we're getting creative here for the connection. Between these.

Farbod: Totally.

Daniel: I think you'll under, you know, I think we'll get it right. It, vibes, it jives really, really well in an unexpected way. So, check out that link in the show notes and then come on back to us now so we can talk to you about a robotic wedding cake.

Farbod: I guess let's get into it. That's the best segue, the robotic wedding cake. All right. So, we're at EPFL. Haven't been there in a minute. And this team created what they called the RoboCake. It's an edible robotic wedding cake that they showed off in a expo in Osaka in 2025. The robotic part is a bunch of these teddy bears, like the gummy bears that you find in your Haribo's bag or whatever, just a little bit bigger, sitting on top of the cake and they are dancing. What's crazy about that, I mean, I'm sure we've all seen plastic dancing robots for toys or whatever. These things are made of gelatin and syrup and they're animated by like this internal pneumatic system, which is, know, pressure-based and they're totally edible. Like you can just grab the dancing gummy bear and eat it. And before this, before we got on the call to do this interview. Daniel actually brought up a great memory from our childhood, one of our favorite movies that this reminded him of. So, you want to share that?

Daniel: Yeah. So, I don't remember how far back my obsession goes, but definitely from reading the books. And then I think it was galvanized when I watched the movies, Harry Potter. He's like on the train headed to Hogwarts for the first time and the snack cart goes by, and they get a chocolate frog and he opens it and he's like, Oh, like, cool. Like it's a chocolate frog. And then it starts like jumping around and it's completely animated and it's, chocolate. It's fully edible. It's just chocolate, but it's also animated. And it's like this frog that's jumping around. He's like, Oh my God, is this a real frog? This is the closest thing I've ever seen to that. But my entire life, I've always thought like, well, one, love chocolate, but I've always thought it would be so cool to actually get a real chocolate frog. This is the closest thing from a technological realm I've ever seen to that. These dancing gummy bears. You'll have to check out the link in the show notes to this article and just look at least at a photo of the wedding cake, if not the video that's attached. But like, you need to see the extent to which this is really impressive. it looks like a, it looks like a Disneyland ride. Like it's a small world with like animated characters. It's dancing gummy bears on top of a wedding cake. The batteries that power it and power the lights are also completely edible. Like it's like the dream from my childhood that like, oh, you can have these characters that dance around, but also, they're fully edible. Like the way that Harry Potter eats the chocolate frog. It's like, it's the perfect connection.

Farbod: Dude, I totally agree. And I'm happy you brought up chocolate because that's like another critical component of what's going on here, for these robots to operate, there's gotta be energy or something coming from somewhere. And one of the secret sauces here is these edible batteries that are composed of chocolate, vitamin B2, and activated carbon, to name a few. And it's powerful enough that it can make the teddy bear's pneumatic system dance, but also, like, power LEDs on a cake. So, pretty impressive all around, but I guess what most folks are probably thinking at this point, it's like, why? What was going through the mind of the researchers at EPFL to focus on something like this?

Daniel: And usually, when I eat batteries, it's not.

Farbod: Okay.  

Daniel: Sorry.  

Farbod: I learned more about you. Every time we do an episode. I guess I learned today that you love eating batteries. You're. Yeah. Spare time. Wonderful. So, moving away from that, the concept of edible electronics has the potential to limit a lot of electronic waste. And that can amount to 40 million tons annually, I think is what the report said. Obviously not all of our waste can be turned into something edible, but it just gives you an idea. Even if it's 1%, that's still quite significant. Innovation in food, the world of fancy gastronomy is always mind blowing. remember, think it's Alenia. That's one of the leading restaurants in the world. It's one of the best in America that made a floating hydrogen balloon out of apple caramel that you could just like basically bite into, suck in the hydrogen, have a funny voice, and then you eat the apple caramel. And that's just so fun. Right. And this feels like another natural evolution in that is that if you think of food as art, as more than just sustenance. This gets you to that point of being a child and wanting to eat a chocolate frog or a dancing gummy bear.

Daniel: Well, that's what I was going to say is I actually saw I was on a business trip this week and I went out to dinner with one of our business partners and it was they took us, like they're whining and dining us and they took us up to like the 57th floor roof bar at the top of this hotel in Monterey, Mexico. I'm like looking at the mountains and there's a beautiful view. But what I'm going for here is the food was super fancy. Like people were having like they were getting drinks with gold foil on top.  And I took a photo of the creme brulee, which I need to send to you for both. But like took a photo of the creme brulee and it's like this beauty. It's not just food. It's a piece of art. And it's like this this fancy restaurant. And obviously the bill was super steep. And it's not like this type of place you eat all the time for fun, but when you want to appreciate that food is art and food and eating is an experience and experiential art. This is the exact type of restaurant that at a minimum, I think that's the minimum impact this will have is restaurants like that with really, really forward-looking chefs that are using culinary arts and like truly understanding it as an art to combine technology and gastronomy to make an awesome eating experience. This would be awesome to, I don't know, for a kid's birthday, I wanted these fancy restaurants to bring out a dancing gummy bear and then the kid gets to eat it. Like that's, that's super cool. And I can see I would want it. Yeah. I'm the kid. If you, if you haven't noticed, I'm the kid in this story.  Like there's, there's, it sounds trivial or it sounds, I don't know, like.

Farbod: It sounds unserious, but you re you take a step back and you realize that these little things actually mean a lot in life. It adds the color, you know?

Daniel: Exactly. And like you can make food interactive, fun, like adds a whole new layer to the way that like all these restaurants will be trying to like one up each other with like have fanciest dessert ever. But I think that they also have noble intentions in trying to reduce electronic waste. So, when you're using electronics that can't be disposed of easily, is there an alternative that's at minimum food safe and compostable, even if you don't eat it, is it food safe and compostable? Can you use that instead? Can you use this as a way to deliver food to people in a way that doesn't create a lot of waste to deliver medicine into the body? There's a lot of different applications they talked here around like using an edible battery as something as something that powers a sensor to monitor food freshness. Things to help animals, things to deliver emergency nutrition to people in starving countries, like starving areas and countries. that's a, these are all, I would say like, again, the worst case is fancy restaurants get a cool, cool, thing that we want to try out one day. The best case is there's actually a whole layer of innovation that this unlocks in terms of the way that we interact with deliver food, nutrition, medicine, like there's, I appreciate people doing innovation in this space because there's probably a bunch of knock-on effects that we can't even identify today that at some point in the future, we'll point back at this and say, hey, it started with a robocake.

Farbod: I completely agree with you. And the way I see it, it's kind of like a Trojan horse. Like you're saying the Trojan horse being the fun dancing gummy bears that you can eat. And then the soldiers are hiding on the inside are a revolution when it comes to plastic, one time use plastics and the things that we discard and the ways that we create being solved. Worst case scenario, even if the soldiers don't work out and they get defeated, you've still got a fun wooden horse. In that case, it's the dancing teddy bears. So, it's a win-win all around. But yeah, I'm pretty excited about this. It's definitely a fun change of pace in terms of what we see coming out of academia.  I think it's a testament to how creative some of these researchers can be if given the opportunity. I love this kind of cross-discipline collaboration.

Daniel: And that's what really gets us excited, right? Is roboticists collaborating with chemists collaborating with pastry chefs? Like that's, it sounds like a don't know.

Farbod: It's a match made in heaven.

Daniel: But I don't know. It shows off this idea of edible robots, edible features. Definitely showing off the feature of robotic food.

Farbod: 100 percent. I'm going to quickly wrap all of this up.

Daniel: Yes, sir.

Farbod: Basically, have you ever looked at your cake and thought this could be more interesting? Well, it turns out so did these folks over at EPFL and so much so in fact that they decided to reinvent the wedding cake into what they call the robocake into something that has dancing gummy bears on top of it that are completely edible being powered by edible battery. That's right, the whole thing is edible. So, if you're like Daniel and you've been wanting to live this life of eating the chocolate frog from Harry Potter or any moving, dancing, actuating piece of chocolate or food, these folks might have the answer for you. But all jokes aside, the reality is that they're kind of focused on how can we change our perception of single-use plastics or things that we discard with some of these naturally made materials, edible or not, and be a little bit more conscious about how we use our resources and help each other have a better planet. That's it.

Daniel: Love it. And there's a bad joke in here that it doesn't make.

Farbod: Send it.

Daniel: Like sometimes you want robots. Sometimes you want cake. This gives us the opportunity to have your robotic cake and eat it too.

Farbod: I like it, very dad joke. Six out of 10, very solid.

Daniel: There we go. The cringe factor is 10 out 10.

Farbod: It still lands. It hits the landing quite well.

Daniel: With you and I, maybe not with everyone else.

Farbod: That's all that matters.

Daniel: Yeah, exactly.

Farbod: And on that note, that's the pod.

Daniel: See you, everyone.

As always, you can find these and other interesting & impactful engineering articles on Wevolver.com.

To learn more about this show, please visit our shows page. By following the page, you will get automatic updates by email when a new show is published. Be sure to give us a follow and review on Apple podcasts, Spotify, and most of your favorite podcast platforms!

--

The Next Byte: We're two engineers on a mission to simplify complex science & technology, making it easy to understand. In each episode of our show, we dive into world-changing tech (such as AI, robotics, 3D printing, IoT, & much more), all while keeping it entertaining & engaging along the way.