Barcelona studio Makeat redraws gastronomic innovation by crossing design, technology, cooking and creativity.
Makeat is not easy to define, but let us begin by saying that it is a centre for innovation, design and product development dedicated exclusively to gastronomy, although that description, as we shall see, falls somewhat short. Makeat was founded in Barcelona in 2018 by Juan Manuel Umbert and Adrià Colominas, and since then it has worked for some of the finest restaurants in the world, among them Lasarte, Disfrutar, Aponiente and Martín Berasategui, and for first-rank brands, from Moët & Chandon to Jimmy Choo, Levi’s and Mandarin Oriental. If you come across a cup that is really a cake, an edible geometric fox or even the giant chocolate elephant with which the pastry chef Lluc Crusellas won the 2022 World Chocolate Masters, have no doubt: Makeat is behind it.
One might venture that with them anything is possible, because they are a step ahead of everyone else. If nouvelle cuisine put recipes in order and Ferran Adrià’s elBulli took technique and ingredient to their limits, Makeat works on a different and still little-explored layer: that of design and technology as a creative language. It is not a restaurant, nor an agency, nor a laboratory, though it has something of all three. It is a category that barely has a name, and Umbert and Colominas are among the few defining it, at a moment when the sector is looking for precisely that, a way to stand out when almost everything seems to have been explored already. And more and more people eager to stand out and innovate are knocking at their door.
To understand how they think and work, and how they read and foresee the future of haute cuisine, we spoke with Juan Umbert about what Makeat does and how they redefine themselves at every step in a trade that changes every few months. As he puts it himself, “conceptually we are indefinable, because we are always evolving”.
You say that at Makeat purpose comes before vision or objectives. What is that purpose? Ours fits into three words: Awakening Gastronomist Potential. Awakening is the part to do with imagination, with the abstract, the territory where we work with professionals on emotions, sensations and ideas. From there we bring everything down to tangible products, prototypes that interact with those people again and generate emotion again. It is a circle: when you create a new sensation through an idea, you set something in motion that allows the world to move forward.
And where does gastronomy fit within that formula? For us it is a discipline of transformation. You are what you eat. Food connects us to the land, to culture, to the most emotional part of ourselves. We do not only nourish the stomach, we nourish the soul. And the potential to achieve that is the tool: 3D printing, laser cutting, digital fabrication. We do not use it as a fashion. We use it because it amplifies creative work and the relationship between people.
We do not only nourish the stomach, we nourish the soul.
How does your way of seeing things differ from the avant-garde that came before?
Nouvelle cuisine put recipes and quantities in order, and Ferran Adrià took technique and ingredient to another level. But a point of blockage arrived, with every texture and technique seemingly explored. That is where a new layer has appeared: that of imagination on the plate. We work on it, with a triangle of three points. The first is neuroscientific: how an object stimulates you before you taste it, its colour, its shape, the moment in the service at which it appears. People consume first with their eyes and come back with their stomach. The second is nutritional: well-made produce, provenance, clean label. And the third, the time-honoured organoleptic one: flavour, texture, recipe. We design for all three at once, with the product at the centre.
How is the team organised internally? Picture Makeat as a brain. It has two halves. The eat side is the more logical one, devoted to research: cooks, pastry chefs, bartenders, people who ferment, all working in the kitchen every day. The make side is the creative one: designers, engineers, packaging. When a question comes up about an ingredient or a technique, three cooks give you three answers; six different profiles give you six ideas, and from that something new is born. What matters is that the two halves share everything, constantly. While one team cooks, another is perfecting a technique to paint bonbons with a laser.
And how many people make up this brain? Between twenty and twenty-five people, with several companies already born around us. In 2018, if you talked about 3D printing, people thought you were mad. In eight or nine years the change has been enormous, and professionals in the sector have begun to look for something of their own, something that sets them apart.
Makeat works like the two halves of a brain.
Where do you and Adrià Colominas come from? We met before Makeat, at a sustainability and gastronomy event I was running with Platin Institute, and from 2015 we were working on future scenarios, a lack of nutrition, problems with plastic, upcycling, and on tangible solutions that we tested in workshops with professionals from the sector. I used to spend time at the Ateneu de Fabricació, where you learn to use digital machinery. One day Adri took a plastic bottle, a razor blade and a laser-cut piece, and made me a beach chair. I thought: this man is a genius.
One day Adri took a plastic bottle, a razor blade and a laser-cut piece, and made me a beach chair.
What were the first commissions like? The first commissions were pure survival craftsmanship. For the first one, an edible gold ingot bearing the Meliá logo, we improvised a thermoforming machine with a tub of cream, a vacuum cleaner and the heating element from a hairdryer. For months I went round the pastry shops of Barcelona on a moped, offering 3D personalisation to people who did not yet know they needed it.
And the turning point? It came almost all at once. At an event in France I met someone who, weeks later, spoke about us to Martín Berasategui’s team. Almost in parallel, the pastry chef Mikel Guarro commissioned from us a coffee cup that was really a tiramisu, and which became well known. Then came Ramón Freixa. People who are genuine artists were valuing what we did. It is not that you make a living from it, but it reinforces the purpose you came here for. In that moment the stars aligned.
Today you do make a living from this. In what areas does Makeat work? We work on three fronts: a consultancy, an online shop and the development of our own companies. The consultancy develops tableware, moulds, formulas and recipes for restaurants across Europe. The shop sells our own collections and tools, such as the stamps for decorating bonbons. We firmly believe in democratising innovation and not leaving it accessible only to a privileged few. On the third front we create our own companies: Plesh, for example, is devoted to indulgent sugar-free snacks, born of our research and of a partner, Jaume Betrián. Behind it all we keep certain lines of work open out of conviction: new sugars, new proteins, upcycling, coffee without coffee, chocolate without chocolate. We know the future lies there.
What do you take into account when accepting a project? We have a clear line: if someone comes purely to make money, we won’t do it. Nor do we accept projects that involve excessive use of plastic or that clash with our values. But if someone arrives with a bold idea, true to their identity and full of enthusiasm, money is rarely a barrier.
We firmly believe in democratising innovation and not leaving it accessible only to a privileged few. If someone arrives with a bold idea, true to their identity and full of enthusiasm, money is rarely a barrier.
How do you look after knowledge? With an internal talent programme that is not work experience as usual: each new arrival gets a mentor and a long-term project of their own. Much of that research ends up applied in a consultancy job or a product; the rest stays within the house. Innovation happens when you accumulate so much knowledge that, suddenly, a tool, a technique, an ingredient and a problem cross paths and a solution appears. Sometimes it is something you recover two years later: you remember that experiment with the orange that left a paste you could make an eggless cake with, and all at once it fits.
How do you keep that curiosity and that learning up to date? In very different ways: international fairs, two or three courses a year, reading a great deal, and, above all, interdisciplinarity. I am not a trained designer, but I know how to design because I work with the best designers. When we get together to think as a team, you always come away with something, because learning is osmotic. I think of Steve Jobs and his unique capacity for crossing things, typography with the chip factory. It is exactly the dynamism we try to generate here, a place where someone suddenly turns up with an idea that had not been thought of. And I stand up for error: getting it wrong in the studio is a virtue, not a punishment. If you don’t try something, you never reach the solution.
When you work as a team, you always come away with something, because learning is osmotic.
Haute cuisine often lives in a bubble, disconnected from an ordinary person who neither understands nor cares about what happens at an avant-garde table. And there the paradox appears: do you work inside that bubble, or does your way of innovating force you to keep your feet on the ground? It is an interesting and necessary reflection. That is why the skill we train most is observation. Within our method there is a sacred word: the user. We design so that people enjoy themselves and improve their experience. We run interviews, focus groups, we go to restaurants to see how things actually happen. What we are after is democratising creativity: personalising for any bar or restaurant within a day, something 3D printing makes possible. We create without restrictions, but we always land with empathy, because the people who pay and the people who know are ordinary people.
What part does artificial intelligence play in your work? It is here, that is a fact, and we use it at every stage, from visual references to logistics, including the shop’s customer service. But what matters is the order: we think first. My reservation is not technical, it is human: the moment you ask a machine who you are, you are lost. The machine will never have your problems: it is never hungry, never sad, never heartbroken. And much of creativity comes precisely from there, from pain, from imagination and from memory. The tool extends your capabilities; it does not decide the path.
Much of creativity comes from pain, from imagination and from memory, and a machine will never feel hunger, sadness or heartbreak.
You mention a method. Do you work with defined frameworks? With two. Food Thinking is an evolution of design thinking adapted to gastronomy, and it organises the consultancy into phases: inspire, research, ideate, design and prototype, experiment and analyse, a cycle built never to close. The second we call FAC·U², and it structures product design around four vertices: functionality, aesthetic, concept and user. The user is squared because there are two, the professional who uses the tool and the diner who enjoys it.
Which of those vertices rules? It is always the marriage of aesthetic and functionality. The most beautiful squeezer in the world, if it doesn’t squeeze, is no use. But for us the decisive thing is the concept: it has to be clear, comprehensible, so that your grandmother understands it. Hence the difficulty of defining Makeat. Conceptually we are indefinable, because we are always evolving.
In these accelerated years, with a pandemic that has changed how we relate to one another and a life increasingly mediated by screens, what is the deep change running through gastronomy today, if there is one? It is true that we are living through turbulent times, and to my mind the result is one of behaviour: we are growing comfortable. If a robot cleans the house, why would I clean it? If I have ready meals at the supermarket, why would I cook? There lies the problem at the root, because gastronomy demands that you know how to cook in order to understand and enjoy it. And the standardisation worries me. Globalisation has brought something good and something bad: in every city in the world there is a Mexican, a Japanese, a Thai. There is a lack of plurality. And this comes from someone who automates factories, so it is a contradiction I accept: I will automate everything monotonous and repetitive, because that too is quality of life, and I will keep the people who want to create.
And where does all that take us? I see a turning point close at hand. In very little time we will see how the world’s problems intersect with human capabilities and how technology disrupts everything. There will be a moment of singularity, for certain.
For better or for worse? I want to think for the better. Human consciousness is awake, we are beings of light. We are living the best moment in history and, at the same time, the worst: Taoism would say that we have the greatest conveniences in the universe and yet we are more prisoners than ever of our own reality. We believe that two thousand years ago we were Neanderthals on a cart, but perhaps we were far more connected to the cosmos and to nature than we are today, now that we believe we are capable of mastering it.
