The ask
After the 1-hour photo service, HEMA wanted the next trick: your photo, printed on a cake, ready for pickup. Same consumer promise, one difference: the printer outputs icing.
What I did
- Extended the photo-ordering flow and print pipeline to a new output medium: industrial food printers
- Dealt with the surprisingly deep problems of edible printing: color profiles for icing, food-safe consumables, and what “print quality” means when the canvas is a cake
- Kept the ordering, routing and store-logistics side identical, so stores got a new product without a new process
How it went
Shipped, and it worked: birthdays across the Netherlands got measurably weirder. Technically it remains one of my favorite projects. The moment your deployment target is a cake, every assumption in your pipeline gets re-examined.