Is dental resin food safe (or has anyone found other solutions)?

I’m wondering if anyone has made progress on achieving food-safe castings from a Formlabs print?

A local Chocolatier has expressed interest in creating chocolate molds. @ThomasRoussel experimented with this a couple years ago and achieved stunning results, but there was some concern about actually ingesting the product since the standard resins aren’t foodsafe.

Someone suggested food contact epoxy, and another thread talked about Smooth-On Task 11.

Another brave soul posted a 2-part Youtube video going into great detail on how he designed, printed and cast a chocolate face (which he ate at the end, after a disclaimer).

Since then, Formlabs came out with it’s new bio-compatible resin. It’s intended for dentistry implements (which certainly have more contact with the inside of your mouth than would trace debris from a food mold) but I’m not sure how it fairs against generally accepted / FDA standards concerning food safety since it wasn’t engineered for that purpose.

Any thoughts / ideas? Are there any experts out there who can chime in?

I would like to know as well. I bought the Form2 to develop prototype models to use with a shaved ice business. One product would come in contact with the water before freezing into blocks of ice for a short period of time ( less than a minute). Others would have more contact. We would want to test in “the field”, so to speak before mass production, so we would like something that would be safe to use.

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In case anyone’s interested, this is what I heard back from Support:

The Dental SG resin is a class 1 bio-compatible resin. This means that it can be used in the mouth for a single use under 24 hours. It is made for the specific use of dental industry for making surgical guides. For these reasons it should not be used for chocolate mold making.

Open to other ideas.

How about printing out a positive of the image you want, then vacuum forming a piece of plastic over that which you will use for the chocolate mold? Not sure if you would capture enough quality with this method, but thats what the little chocolate molds i have seen in the store are made from. Just an idea!

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The easiest thing would be to print out a positive and cast a mold from a conventional food safe material like silicone.

Since I’m quoted in the first message, let me give you my thoughts on all of that…
With SLA printing, we are manipulating a lot of chemical materials. I don’t know for the Dental FormLabs material, but the IPA bath kills for me the whole process. Even after some good cleanup, I’m sure some post curing will still keep some IPA in the material. I am -not- a chemical specialist, but for me, the whole process makes the out of the printer solution out of the equation.

Then I have various alternatives:

  • Printing the positive shape with the printer, then after cleaning/post process, I can apply a food compatible varnish (not sure of the english translation…), then creating an epoxy or silicon food compatible mold from this shape. Epoxy is great because it’s a strong material for chocolate and such while silicon is too flexible. It really depends of your needs.

  • Using an FDM printer with a dedicated nozzle for these projects and using a food safe PLA to print a mold or positive shape. It’s a solution that I will experiment really soon. FDM printers can acheive very nice shapes as soon as you are not looking for ultra fine details. I still prefer by far my Form1+ for figurine stuff, but my Ultimaker 2+ Extended can achieve impressive results.

But for me, the layers and supports system makes the UM2+/FDM out of the equation for chocolat molds, Form1+ and Epoxy molds is the best solution.

This project looks interesting for me for chocolate molds in addition to 3D printing, but well, May 2017 is so far… https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1094489804/formbox-a-desktop-vacuum-former-that-makes-beautif

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