A fancy design in the foam atop your latte can make your morning cup of coffee even more of a pick me up. But even the world’s most artistically inclined baristas can’t compete with this coffee machine that prints photos, submitted by the customer, directly on their latte.
Engineered by a Taiwanese convenience store as a way to really personalise its customers’ drinks — and as a clever marketing stunt to lure people away from Starbucks — the coffee printer actually kind of cheats. Most baristas will create an image on a latte by swirling and manipulating the milk foam, but this machine instead dusts the latte with an edible powder — cocoa or coffee grinds presumably — using a computer-controlled print head that results in surprisingly high quality images.
So latte art purists will probably scoff at its technique, but regular coffee fans might want to find a way to frame these on their walls.