Ho all!!

I am thinking about getting an edible printer and I would greatly appreciate some feedback on what everyone recommends!!

I do not do cakes.  I make cake pops(thinking about doing cake pucks).  But I also make some chocolates and chocolate covered oreos.  I have been buying some predesigned chocolate transfer sheets for the oreos and my customers love them.  But they are quite expensive along with the shipping and was thinking of getting into making my own. 

Thanks in advance for any suggestions!

Teresa 

Hi Teresa,

You would want to purchase an edible printing when you are purchasing pre prints a few times per month.  Depending on the ink you buy, that will determine how often you need to print.   With Icing Images edible inks, you want to print once every week to two weeks. Keep in mind with chocolate, you cannot print white.  If you are printing on a transfer sheet, the absence of color would be no color.  When you have the preprints, they actually have white printed.  You can also consider printing on icing sheets when you want white, but the entire background would be the color of the icing sheet which is white.  Icing Images actually has Oreo sized icing sheets that are precut.  You would use the iPrint program to print directly on to the circles.  These have been a strong demand from our company.  

Regarding printer types, Canon all the way.  It allows for easy cleaning should you get a clog.  Epsons do not.  What really matters the most are the inks.  The inks drive the success of the printer.  You get what you pay for in edible inks as well.  If you go after a cheap brand, you will spend more in time fixing problems and money replacing inks and printheads should you get a bad brand.  In addition, you will note that the colors do not come out as true.  Icing Images is constantly trying to improve on quality, even when the quality is excellent.  We are working on another formula now and if you ask our customers they will testify to how amazing our inks are already!  There is always room for improvement!

Regarding edible paper, most of it costs about the same. But there are different qualities.  Here are what you should be looking at:  Does it remove from its backing easily when its humid? Does it fall off the backing when its dry? How does it taste? Does it work on the medium you are interested in using?  For example, most icing sheets do not work well on whipped.  This is not a deal breaker for you however.  Some icing sheets cause build up on rollers when printing causing a line to go down the page.  

I can tell you that Icing Images has 2 different types of paper that will interest you. We have others, but they won't work for your purposes. One is the Simi Transfer sheet, while this is for isomalt, it works well on chocolate.  See the video on Icing Images website for videos that are used with chocolate.  The Icing Images Premium Icing Sheets offer precuts for you as mentioned above that are the perfect size for Oreos plus there is a large array of different sizes/shapes.  There is a free program with Icing Images products.  

You should be looking at the smaller printers such as the Icing Images Stand-alone system.  It is the perfect machine because you are not buying more than you need.  It is sold in kits, but if you request, Icing Images can switch out the 8.5x11 sheets for one of the cake pop size icing sheets.  

Service is very important when choosing your supply company.  You want a company  that is knowledgeable whose staff uses the product so they are familiar with it.  

I hope this is helpful and I will be more than happy to answer any other questions you may have or you can email us directly at [email protected].

Thank you