Swedish municipalities plan to start 3D-printing at care homes for the elderly, stimulating residents' appetites by aking puréed food look like the real thing.

"When you find it hard to chew and swallow, the food that exists today doesn't look very appetising," explained Richard Asplund, head of the catering department at Halmstad municipality on the west coast.

"So the idea is to make something more aesthetic to look at, to make it look good to eat by recreating the original form of the food."

Together with its project partners, the municipality hopes to be able to take purified broccoli and chicken, which is today served in dull circular or square slabs thickened with egg and starch, and then reconstitute it into florets and drumsticks.

"It will look like a chicken leg, but you could compare the consistency to panna cotta," Asplund said.

Evelina Höglund, the researcher coordinating the project at the state innovation body Rise, said that homes faced a daily battle to get residents with dysphagia, or difficulty swallowing, to eat sufficiently.

"It's a big problem that people who get consistency adapted food get malnourished because they eat too little," she said.

Around eight per cent of adults in Sweden have difficulties chewing or swallowing.