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A Pinch of Salt, a Dash of Innovation: Unlocking Materials Freedom with Indirect AM

21.11.2025

While Additive Manufacturing (AM) has transformed design and production across industries, many functional materials remain incompatible with direct printing due to rheological, thermal, or regulatory constraints. This is particularly true for food-grade materials, reactive metals like magnesium, and even conventional polymers like polystyrene. To address these limitations, we showcase the benefits of indirect AM, which decouples material performance from printability. More specifically, indirect AM leverages 3D printing to create sacrificial molds with high geometric fidelity, which serve as temporary templates for casting or infiltration of otherwise unprintable materials.

In this talk, we present the case of sallea, an ETH Zurich Spin-off, as an example for the successful implementation of indirect AM in the food industry. Sallea leverages 3D printed sodium chloride (NaCl) molds to develop protein-based, edible scaffolds for the cultivated meat industry. We will showcase how NaCl can be printed by different methods, including extrusion-based and light-based, and discuss its beneficial properties such as affordability, biocompatibility and high temperature resistance.

Beyond food applications, we will demonstrate how the same NaCl-based molds can be used to structure challenging, yet highly demanded, materials such as magnesium and polystyrene. These examples illustrate the versatility of indirect AM in expanding the reach of additive technologies to material classes that have traditionally been excluded from AM workflows.

Speaker: Nicole Kleger, CTO, sallea AG