The chocolate 3D printer market just got its most credible upgrade yet. Cocoa Press 2 is a desktop chocolate 3D printer made by Cocoa Press, a startup founded by Ellie Rose, who began the project in 2014 during a high school engineering class and took it full-time after graduating from Penn Engineering in 2019. The company has now hired David Randolph, a former Prusa executive with ten years of manufacturing experience, to help scale the Cocoa Press 2 into a serious commercial product.
What Makes the Cocoa Press 2 a Real Chocolate 3D Printer
The Cocoa Press 2 is built around a custom chocolate extruder designed for optimal flow, paired with a dual heating system that maintains temperature to within ±0.1°C accuracy. That level of thermal precision matters enormously with chocolate, which transitions between solid and liquid states within a narrow temperature band. Get it wrong by even a few degrees and you get bloom, clogging, or a structurally useless print.
Print volume sits at 135mm x 135mm x 150mm, with a physical footprint of 365mm x 315mm x 700mm — compact enough for countertop use. Two nozzle sizes are available: 0.8mm for detail work and 1.6mm for faster, chunkier prints. Chocolate is loaded via 65g cocoa cores, a cartridge-style system that keeps handling clean and consistent. The design is modular and upgradeable, and the software is open-source with no subscription fees, running on PrusaSlicer — the same slicer used for plastic filament printers.
How to 3D Print Chocolate with Cocoa Press
The workflow is deliberately straightforward. Load a chocolate core into the printer and allow fifteen minutes for preheating. From there, browse an existing design library, find files online, or create your own geometry. Run the design through PrusaSlicer to generate layer-by-layer instructions, then press print. The process mirrors desktop FDM printing closely enough that anyone familiar with a Prusa or Bambu machine will feel at home immediately.
Future compatibility with a peripheral called Cocoa Buddy is planned, which would enable multi-colour and continuous designs. That feature is not yet available, but its presence on the roadmap signals that Cocoa Press is thinking beyond single-flavour novelty prints toward genuinely complex confectionery work.
Cocoa Press 2 vs Traditional Chocolate Confectionery
The core argument Cocoa Press makes against traditional chocolate production is the elimination of molds. Molds constrain geometry — you get the shape the mold allows, at the volume the mold produces. A chocolate 3D printer removes that constraint entirely, enabling personalised, on-demand pieces in forms that no mold could produce. Intricate lattices, custom text, unusual textures — these are geometrically trivial for a 3D printer and physically impossible for traditional casting.
The honest limitation is throughput. Each cocoa core holds 65g of chocolate, which means this is not a production line replacement. It is a precision tool for small-batch, high-value, or highly personalised work. Chocolatiers, bakeries, and event caterers are the obvious early adopters — not confectionery factories.
Cocoa Press 2 Pricing and What You Get
The DIY kit version of the Cocoa Press 2 starts at $1,499, with a listed regular price of $2,063. The fully assembled Cocoa Press 2 Pro, which includes ten milk cocoa cores, starts at $4,495. Both are available directly through cocoapress.com and through resellers including vector3d.shop.
The price gap between kit and Pro is significant, but the Pro targets buyers who want a ready-to-run machine without assembly. For a professional kitchen or a confectionery business testing the technology, the Pro’s out-of-box readiness likely justifies the premium. For a technically confident hobbyist or a maker space, the kit price is more accessible — and the open-source software means there is no ongoing subscription cost eating into the value proposition.
Does hiring a former Prusa executive matter for Cocoa Press?
It matters more than a typical executive hire. Prusa Research is one of the most respected names in desktop 3D printing, known for manufacturing discipline and community-driven development. David Randolph’s ten years of experience there brings exactly the kind of production scaling knowledge that a hardware startup needs when moving from founder-led prototyping to repeatable manufacturing. Cocoa Press 2 is a technically capable machine — the question has always been whether the company can build and support it at scale. Randolph’s appointment is a direct answer to that question.
Is the Cocoa Press 2 worth it for a home user?
At $1,499 for the DIY kit, the Cocoa Press 2 is a serious investment for a home user. It makes most sense for enthusiasts who already work with 3D printing and want to extend that skill into food, or for small food businesses exploring personalised confectionery. Casual buyers looking for a novelty gadget will find the price and the fifteen-minute preheat requirement a reality check.
What chocolate can you use in the Cocoa Press 2?
The Cocoa Press 2 uses proprietary 65g cocoa cores rather than arbitrary chocolate bars or chips. This keeps the extrusion consistent and the thermal management predictable. The Pro package ships with ten milk cocoa cores included, giving buyers an immediate start without sourcing additional materials.
Cocoa Press has built something technically credible in a category that has historically been full of vaporware and overpriced novelties. With David Randolph now steering manufacturing and the Cocoa Press 2 shipping in both kit and fully assembled forms, this is the most production-ready chocolate 3D printer available today. Whether the market is large enough to sustain a dedicated hardware company is still an open question — but Ellie Rose has been working on that answer since 2014, and she is clearly not done yet.
Edited by the All Things Geek team.
Source: Tom's Hardware
