Back in mid-April, The Spoon first started getting tips that Basil Street Pizza was looking for a buyer.
When we emailed the maker of automated pizza-making kiosks, the auto-responder we got back was essentially a for-sale sign: “Thanks for your message. Basil Street Cafe is currently seeking qualified individuals or groups interested in acquiring company assets. If you are interested in purchasing assets of the company, please contact it’s Chief Restructuring Officer, Jeff Klemp”
The news of Basil Street’s liquidation comes just about six months after the company announced its deal with Prepango to put the APK in airports. The company had planned to expand to up to 200 airports in the coming year.
While Klemp had a “no comment” for us, The Spoon has since learned the company has about 30 or so automated pizza kitchens (not all are currently deployed) which it’s looking to sell alongside the rest of its assets, including patents, software source code and more.
All of this makes it worth asking: have we reached peak pizza robot? With Pizzametry, Basil Street, Picnic, API Tech, Pazzi , Hyper-Robotics or Piestro to name a few (not to mention any secret projects the big guys may or may not be working on), the market is certainly pretty crowded.
A counterpoint might be that pizza is one of the world’s most popular foods, and there will always be demand for pizza-making technology, especially with most of the big chains yet to roboticize their operations.
Either way, it looks like Basil Street won’t be one of the brands fighting it out for market share in the future. Anyone looking to join that fight, however, can accelerate their entry by scooping up Basil Street’s assets.
Better hurry though: tomorrow is the last day the company is taking bids.
Leave a Reply