Food-safe 3D printing for abrasion and wear-resistant parts

In practice these get used interchangeably, but the meaningful distinction is what's being certified. FDA compliance and EU Regulation 10/2011 conformity apply to the raw material — its composition, additives, and migration behavior under defined test conditions. They don't certify your finished part, your printing process, or your application. Compliance is the starting point; the finished component still has to be evaluated in its actual use case.

No. The declaration of conformity covers the material as supplied. What happens between the spool and the finished component — nozzle material, printer cleanliness, colorant contamination from previous jobs, post-processing chemicals — is outside that scope. If food-contact compliance matters for your application, either print on dedicated equipment with a hardened steel or stainless nozzle, or order finished parts from the igus 3D printing service.

This is a limitation of specific 3D printing processes. FDM and SLS parts have layer lines, micro-voids, and a matte, porous surface texture at the microscopic level. Resin parts from iglide® i6000 print far smoother and close much of that gap, but no additive process fully eliminates it. This is why printed food-industry components are best used as machine elements — bushings, guides, gripper jaws, conveyor parts — where contact is incidental rather than as vessels or surfaces that hold food directly. For direct-contact, repeat-use parts, injection molding or machining from bar stock remains the right call.

Blue effectively doesn't occur in food, so a fragment that breaks off a machine component is immediately visible during visual inspection and on optical sorting lines. It's an industry convention rather than a regulation, but most food processors require it. Note that blue pigment alone isn't metal-detectable — if your HACCP plan requires metal detection, you'll need separately specified magnetically detectable parts.

No, and that's the point of using them. Solid lubricants are distributed throughout the material, so parts run dry. In a food plant, this removes food-grade grease from your maintenance routine — one less consumable to track, one less contamination pathway, and no lubricant washing into product or wastewater.

It depends on the material and your sanitation chemistry. Temperature limits matter most: iglide® i151 tops out at 149°F for continuous exposure, which rules out hot caustic wash cycles, while iglide® A350 handles 356°F and superheated steam sterilization. Before specifying, check the material's chemical resistance against your specific detergents and sanitizers — igus can supply that data.

Food conformity declarations and material data sheets are available in the Downloads tab on each product page. These are what your quality team will need for supplier documentation and HACCP records.

The igus 3D printing service prints finished parts in these materials from an uploaded CAD file, with no tooling costs and no minimum order quantity. This is also the more controlled route for food-contact parts, since printing conditions and material handling are managed under a single process.