Beam me up, Yummy! Israeli couple invent Star Trek-like food replicator

A pair of Israeli entrepreneurs have developed a device that could deliver your food fantasy to your plate in less than a minute.

It sounds like something out of Star Trek, but the Genie can produce an unlimited variety of meals using pods, that contain natural dehydrated ingredients. Similar in size and appearance to a coffee maker, the device can create the food you crave in 30 seconds, claim developers Ayelet Carasso and Doron Marco from White Innovation.

"The dish can be anything, it can be a meal like chicken with rice, like couscous with vegetable or an amazing Ramen or even a chocolate soufflé or any other desert that you want," Carasso told Reuters.

"We're using only natural ingredients, we're not using any preservatives or anything that people add to their meals," she added.

Carasso and Marco describe the idea as a real life version of Star Trek's "replicator", a device used to synthesise meals on demand, on board the Starship Enterprise.

Israeli chefs have already begun producing new recipes for The Genie and hope to develop product lines for well known culinary personalities.

They say are already working on expanding the capabilities of the mobile application and expect that in the future, Genie will cater to individual users.

"Eventually, Genie will know your microbiome and will prepare the pod for you, just for you and you will eat better, even tastier and healthier," said 47-year-old Marco.

He expressed the hope that it could day help those in countries that don't have enough food too.

"In our world, we are getting fat and we are throwing away a lot of food, in their world, they don't have any food. So if you use Genie, you can distribute the food better, you can have the shelf life much longer without the preservatives, give the people better food for them," said Marco.

"We can even the food distribution in the world. That's a very, very important goal for us," he added.