Ultimate Latte Art: Taiwanese Cafe Prints Your Portrait on a Cup of Coffee

If you’ve ever wanted to drink your own face, now’s your chance. Taiwanese cafe chain, Let’s Cafe, uses a special latte printer that creates portraits of customers directly on their delicious caffeinated drinks.

Let’s Cafe is a chain of small kiosks offering “fast but good coffee” to shoppers on the go all around Taiwan. Faced with the challenge of competing with larger more established cafe chains, they had to come up with a truly original gimmick in order to attract customers. Let’s Cafe needed something not even big players like Starbucks could compete with, and they found it in the ridiculously accurate coffee printing machine. All users have to do is upload a photo from their mobile phone to the coffee dispenser machine and after the cup has been filled with the caffeinated beverage of their choice, the incorporated printer uses edible ink to sprinkle their photo on the milk foam. While talented latte artists do a great job of creating beautiful designs using rudimentary tools and a steady hand, there are certain limitations to their techniques, whereas this coffee printer is able to produce photo-realistic images.

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According to a promo video released by Let’s Cafe, the coffee printer takes a lot of credit for the chain’s increase in sales. There’s no denying the printed images look amazingly accurate, but taking out the human factor from latte art just makes the whole thing seem soulless. I’m much more impressed by these hand-drawn masterpieces, for example.

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Source: Kotaku

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