News & Triage · Food Printing · Dreaming3D Inc. · Carmel Valley, San Diego

3D Printed Salmon Hit U.S. Grocery Stores? Here's What Perfecta Actually Is

A carousel making the rounds says printed salmon just landed on American shelves. Part of that is true. The salmon is a plant-based patty, it's only sold in the Northeast, and the striped fillet in the pictures isn't for sale. Here's what a food printer really does, who sells printed food today, and what you can print in your own kitchen.

By Dreaming3D · October 14, 2026 · 9 min read

Sep 3, 2026Perfecta's U.S. retail launch

5 productsin the first rollout

Northeastonly, so far. No West Coast date

8 gprotein per 100 g in the salmon patty (our math)

A printer builds a fillet as nested contours of two pastes. The chart shows protein per 100 g across the Perfecta lineup, from the per-serving figures Green Queen reported, against raw Atlantic salmon.

The short version

True: Israeli company Steakholder Foods put its Perfecta plant-based line in Northeastern U.S. stores on September 3, 2026.
Not quite: the "salmon" is a salmon patty. Steakholder hasn't said which products are printed, and one trade outlet describes the patties as extruded.
Not lab-grown: it's soy- and wheat-based. Cultivated salmon exists, but that's a different company and it isn't printed.
Not here yet: nothing announced for San Diego or anywhere on the West Coast.

The carousel, slide by slide

The posts going around use three images. We checked each one against Steakholder's own announcement and the trade coverage.

Half right

"3D printed salmon just hit American grocery stores."

Steakholder did launch Perfecta at stores across the Northeastern U.S. on September 3, with distribution through KeHE. A fact check relayed by Media Bias/Fact Check on October 11 rated "U.S. stores are selling 3D-printed meat" as true, while noting the products are plant-based.

But the salmon product is a plant-based salmon patty, not a fillet. Steakholder's press release lists five products and doesn't say which ones come off a printer. Vegconomist described the range as whole cuts (steak and chicken breast) plus "extruded products such as burgers and fish patties." Some other outlets call all five printed. We can't settle it, so we're not claiming the patty is printed. The cover image, rows of fillets under blue nozzles, doesn't match any Steakholder machine we could find; treat it as an illustration.

Accurate text, misleading photo

"Steakholder Foods just launched its 3D-printed, plant-based meat brand Perfecta… steak, filet mignon, chicken breast, and salmon and whitefish patties."

The product list matches the press release word for word. The photo, a two-nozzle head laying a striped salmon fillet, looks like the demonstration imagery Steakholder uses for its fish printer. That fillet is a capability demo. It isn't one of the five products on U.S. shelves.

Right idea, generic pictures

"Plant protein pastes loaded into a food printer… built layer by layer to copy the flaky color, and fat lines of real salmon."

Broadly, yes: paste goes in, two materials go down, a whole cut comes out. That's how whole-cut food printing works. The pictures read as stock or generated art, though, not Perfecta's factory. One detail to know: "plant protein" fits Steakholder, but the best-known printed salmon, Revo Foods' THE FILET, is made from mycoprotein, which comes from fungi.

A correction on our own site

In June, our bioprinting explainer, The Machines That Print Living Things, filed Steakholder with the cultivated-meat bioprinter companies. That needs updating. What Steakholder sells is printers, premix blends, and now Perfecta, and all of it is plant-based. Its press materials describe cultivated cells as something the company is "exploring." We're fixing that post to match.

What's actually in the Perfecta box

These are the figures Green Queen reported at launch. We converted them to per-100 g so the products compare fairly. We couldn't read the nutrition panels on Perfecta's site, so check the package before you rely on any number here.

Product	Format	Main proteins	Protein per serving	Per 100 g (our math)
Plant-Based Filet Mignon	Whole cut	Soy protein	18 g per 130 g	13.8 g
Plant-Based Chicken Breast	Whole cut	Wheat protein, wheat flour, soy protein and fiber	18 g per 130 g	13.8 g
Plant-Based Marbled Steak	Whole cut	Soy protein	26 g per 250 g	10.4 g
Plant-Based White Fish Patties	Patty	Soy protein, rice flour, potato starch	5 g per 50 g	10 g
Plant-Based Salmon Patties	Patty	Soy protein, rice flour, potato starch	4 g per 50 g	8 g

For scale, raw Atlantic salmon has about 20 g of protein per 100 g in USDA data, so the salmon patty has well under half. That doesn't make it a bad product, but it isn't a protein swap for a fillet. Green Queen also reported that every Perfecta product uses methylcellulose, a common binder in plant-based meat.

About the label. October fact-check reporting found that the packaging doesn't say "3D printed," and no rule requires it to. Perfecta's own website describes a "proprietary production process." When we read it on October 13, it didn't use the words 3D or printed anywhere. If you're hunting for it in a store, look for "Perfecta" and "Premium Plant-Based Meat," not a printing badge.

Nutrition figures are reported, not lab-tested by us, and this isn't dietary advice.

Printed, extruded, cultivated: three different things

Most of the confusion online comes from treating these as one category. They aren't.

	Printed plant-based	Extruded plant-based	Cultivated ("lab-grown")
What it's made of	Plant or fungal protein pastes	Plant protein pushed through a die	Real animal or fish cells grown in tanks
How it gets its shape	Laid down by a printer, often two materials for muscle and fat	Continuous extruder, then cut or formed	Grown, then blended or shaped
Example	Revo Foods' THE FILET; Perfecta's whole cuts (per trade reports)	Most veggie burgers and patties	Wildtype cultivated salmon
Where you can get it	Europe (Revo); Northeastern U.S. (Perfecta)	Everywhere	A handful of U.S. restaurants
Rules	Ordinary food rules	Ordinary food rules	FDA pre-market review (USDA too for meat and poultry). Banned or paused in several states

On the cultivated side: the FDA cleared Wildtype's cultivated coho salmon in May 2025, and it's served in a few restaurants. Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Montana, Indiana, Nebraska, and Texas have passed bans on cultivated meat, and South Dakota started a five-year moratorium on July 1, 2026. California isn't on that list. None of this applies to Perfecta, which contains no animal cells.

How a food printer builds a fillet, in FDM terms

If you run a Bambu or a Creality, you already understand most of this. The big differences are what goes in the hopper and how much comes out per hour.

	Your FDM printer	Steakholder MX200 (meat)	Steakholder HD144 (fish)
Feedstock	Plastic filament on a spool	Premix paste	Premix paste
How it deposits	Melts plastic and extrudes a bead	"Fused Paste Layering," two materials for muscle and fat	"Drop Location in Space," places droplets on demand
Heat	Nozzle at roughly 190–300 °C	Pastes are pushed, not melted. Cooking happens later
Output	Grams per hour	Up to 420 kg per hour (as reported)	Up to 100 kg per hour (company figure)
Cleaning	Wipe the plate	Clean-in-place systems; Steakholder lists high-pressure water jets for the HD144

Our slicer analogy: a printed fillet is a two-material print. The orange "muscle" paste is the infill and the white "fat" paste traces the perimeters, which is why the hero image looks like a slicer preview. The one place the analogy flips is layer adhesion. In PETG you want layers fused. Real salmon flakes apart along its white seams, so a convincing printed fillet needs those seams to give way on a fork, not hold like a good wall.

Who actually sells printed seafood right now

Revo Foods · Vienna

THE FILET, a mycoprotein salmon alternative, went on sale in REWE Group stores in Austria in September 2023. It's widely reported as the first 3D printed food sold in supermarkets. Revo says its Vienna "Taste Factory" can make up to 60 tons a month at full capacity. In 2026 it raised money to start licensing its printers to other companies from autumn 2026. Europe only.

Steakholder Foods · Israel

Builds the printers and premixes, and since September 3 sells Perfecta in the Northeastern U.S. through KeHE. It earlier sold plant-based salmon patties and whitefish kebabs in Israel under a different brand. It says it plans to expand to more regions as demand grows, but hasn't given dates.

Wildtype · San Francisco

Not printed and not plant-based. It grows real salmon cells, cleared FDA review in 2025, and serves its salmon in a few restaurants. We list it because it's the "real salmon without the fish" story people mix up with the printed one.

Can you print food at home?

Yes, but not on the machine you already own. Home food printing today is mostly chocolate and pastes, on dedicated printers.

Printer	Prints	Price	Worth knowing
Cocoa Press	Chocolate	DIY kit $1,499; assembled Pro from $4,495	140 × 150 × 150 mm build, 65–70 g of chocolate per core, about 10 hours to build the kit. Its own cores are compound chocolate (palm-oil based); your own chocolate takes experimenting.
Procusini 5.0	Chocolate, marzipan, pasta	€3,640 at a European reseller	Stainless cartridges, heated holder, mostly uses the maker's refills.
Natural Machines Foodini	Purées, doughs, your own ingredients	About €6,300 (3Dnatives); rental also offered	Five capsules, aimed at restaurants and schools more than home kitchens.

Prices as listed by each source in 2026. Check before you buy.

The San Diego catch. Cocoa Press recommends a room at 64–74 °F and under 50% relative humidity. Coastal San Diego regularly runs wetter than that on marine-layer mornings, and inland garages get far too warm in summer. If you're in Carmel Valley or anywhere near the coast, plan to print chocolate in an air-conditioned room or run a dehumidifier.

Why not just load frosting into your Bambu? A filament printer's whole path is built for plastic: a brass or steel nozzle (common brass nozzle alloys contain a few percent lead), PTFE tubing, greased motion parts, and a hotend running at plastic temperatures. None of it is rated for food, and none of it comes apart for proper washing. Paste extruder conversions exist, but they're a separate, cleanable system, not a filament printer with a different spool. Our food-safe printing guide covers the plastic side in detail.

What we print for kitchens, and what we won't

We're an FDM and resin shop in Carmel Valley. We don't print edible food. A lot of kitchen work is still a good fit, though.

Cookie cutters & dough stamps

Custom shapes, logos, and lettering in PETG or PLA through a stainless nozzle. Treat them as limited-use and hand-wash only, because layer lines hold dough. Our straight answer on food-safe prints explains why.

Masters for silicone molds

We print a high-detail master on our Elegoo Saturn 4 Ultra 16K. You or your confectioner cast food-grade platinum silicone over it. The chocolate only ever touches the silicone.

Kitchen parts that don't touch food

Drawer organizers, spice-rack inserts, cookbook stands, and replacement knobs and clips. For materials, see our food-safe filaments rundown.

What we won't do

Print edible food, cups or anything that holds liquid food, or certify any part as food-contact safe. We also skip load-bearing and safety-critical parts.

Machine time is $7/hour on FDM and $9/hour on resin, plus design time if you need a model built from a sketch.

Over to you: if a printed salmon patty showed up in a San Diego freezer aisle, would you try it, or wait for a real fillet? Tell us on Instagram at @dreaming3dprinting.

Frequently asked questions

Is 3D printed salmon really sold in U.S. grocery stores?

Partly. Steakholder Foods launched its Perfecta line at stores in the Northeastern U.S. on September 3, 2026. The salmon item is a plant-based salmon patty, not a fillet, and Steakholder hasn't said which of the five products are printed. Vegconomist describes the patties as extruded.

Is Perfecta lab-grown meat?

No. Perfecta is plant-based, made mainly from soy and wheat proteins. Lab-grown (cultivated) meat is grown from real animal cells. Wildtype's cultivated salmon is a separate product, served in a few restaurants, and it isn't printed.

Can I buy Perfecta in San Diego?

Not yet. The launch covers the Northeastern U.S. through distributor KeHE, and Steakholder hasn't named a West Coast date or specific stores. It says it plans to expand as demand grows.

Does the package say it's 3D printed?

Fact-check reporting in October said it doesn't, and no rule requires it for plant-based food. Perfecta's own website talks about a "proprietary production process" and, when we read it on October 13, didn't use the words 3D or printed.

Who sold the first 3D printed food in supermarkets?

Revo Foods of Vienna, with THE FILET, a mycoprotein salmon alternative that went on sale in REWE Group stores in Austria in September 2023. It's still sold in Europe, not the U.S.

Can my Bambu or Creality printer print food?

No. Filament printers melt plastic through a brass or steel nozzle and a path that includes PTFE and grease, none of it meant for food. Food printers push pastes or chocolate from cleanable cartridges. If you want to print chocolate at home, look at a dedicated machine like the Cocoa Press.

What food-related things can Dreaming3D print?

Cookie cutters and dough stamps in PETG or PLA through a stainless nozzle (limited use, hand wash), resin masters for food-grade silicone molds, and kitchen organizers that don't touch food. We don't print edible food, drinkware, or anything we'd have to certify as food-contact safe.

Got a cookie cutter idea, or a printer that's acting up?

Dreaming3D prints custom kitchen tools and does mobile 3D printer repair across San Diego County: Bambu Lab, Creality, Prusa, and Elegoo.

Book a repair Text 858-342-6984

dreaming3dprinting@gmail.com · Carmel Valley, San Diego · Worldwide shipping on prints

Sources

Tags: 3D printed food, 3D printed salmon, Steakholder Foods, Perfecta, plant-based seafood, Revo Foods, food 3D printer, Cocoa Press, food-safe 3D printing, San Diego 3D printing

3D Printed Salmon in U.S. Stores? What Perfecta Really Is