Before you get too excited: The price of the machine is roughly $3,300 (30% of that secures your order; the rest is billed once your printer ships, within 9–12 weeks after your deposit is received). Once it arrives, however, the setup is straightforward: Just fill the printer’s syringe with chocolate, select one of two printing heads, and start modeling your cat out of chocolate. Users have access to open-source 3-D software for sketching their designs. But there’s a catch: The printer isn’t yet food-grade certified, meaning that technically it can be used for creative and artistic purposes, not for consumption, though Hao gave us this assurance: “I can eat the printed chocolate myself. [You] need to follow right process to do so.” A food-grade model will be released within the next three to six months.

The very first commercial printer was auctioned on eBay yesterday for GBP 1,9000 (about $3,000); Hao sweetened the deal by including 2% of the company’s gross income for the first year of sales. That might be a prohibitive cost for most interested consumers, but it’s an expense a candy manufacturer can swallow: According to the BBC, Thorntons, Britain’s largest chocolatier, has expressed interest.