Tina Rodia
Based in the Pennovation Center, Cocoa Press is the fledgling 3D printing operation of Evan Weinstein, a May 2019 graduate and a graduate student in the School of Engineering and Applied Science. As a high school student at Springside Chestnut Hill Academy, Weinstein brainstormed an innovative approach to the chocolate industry. “I felt the technology had so much potential, and I wanted to challenge myself to do something innovative.” Why chocolate, though? “I think there’s something about food that people really connect to, and especially chocolate.”
The last two decades have arguably seen a growth in “bean to bar” small-business chocolate ventures, focused on sourcing and curating high-quality small-batch artisanal bars. It’s a departure from a Hershey bar in everything from a conscious cocoa content to ingredients like hand-crushed sel gris flakes and goji berries dusted with maca powder. But the one thing that kept these bars in line with a standard-issue Hershey bar was its shape — and Weinstein is determined to free chocolate hobbyists and small-batch chocolate producers from the confines of the bar.
The technology to elevate chocolate already exists — chocolate molds. But molds are pricey, generally $500 each, and each shape requires a bespoke mold. This was where Weinstein’s high school journey began, with an innovative approach to building chocolate shapes outside of bars and molds.
When he arrived at Penn, he put his chocolate project on hold, but learning about programming electronics and circuitry “connected everything back to 3D printing,” Weinstein says. In the summer after his sophomore year, Weinstein enrolled in physics class and worked in the 3D printing lab in the evenings, where he picked up where he left off with his 3D chocolate printer. By the end of the summer, he applied for the World Maker Faire in 2017, where he presented it as his prototype hobby project.
When his senior year began, Weinstein renamed his project Chocolatier for his senior design project, with five other mechanical engineering students. EAS 549 — Engineering Entrepreneurship Lab — was the class that solidified Weinstein’s chocolate venture as a viable business opportunity.
“The senior design class forces you to solve the engineering side of a problem, and also find stakeholders so you’re not problem-solving in the dark,” says Weinstein. Earlier this spring, he won the Miller Innovation Fellowship at Penn for Cocoa Press, and the week Weinstein graduated, he was accepted into the Pennovation Accelerator program. Now he is putting his graduate work on hold while he finalizes the mechanics of his 3D printers at his office at the Pennovation Center. “It’s great being here,” he says. “In one building, there is the [Penn Vet] Working Dog Center, and in another is Ghost Robotics. Sometimes out of the corner of my eye I’ll see a dog and I’m not sure if it’s a working dog or a robotic dog.”
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