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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Restaurant Tech

ClearCOGS Raises $3.8M its AI-Powered Forecasting Software That Helps Restaurants Reduce Waste

AI-powered restaurant forecasting startup ClearCOGS has raised $3.8 million in an oversubscribed seed round led by Closed Loop Partners, with participation from Myriad Venture Partners and Hearst’s Level Up Ventures. The funding includes $2.3 million in new capital and the conversion of $1.4 million in pre-seed investments. The company’s software provides predictive analytics to assist operators in making decisions around food prep, ordering, and staffing, with an emphasis on reducing food waste and improving operational efficiency.

Company CEO Matt Wampler told The Spoon that he came up with the idea of ClearCOGS during the pandemic. He’d been being laid off and was exploring coding and analytics, when he discovered his cousin who ran a Jimmy John’s franchise was still using a decade-old Excel forecast. Wampler wondered if AI could help create a better predicitve forecasting tool, and before long he had teamed up with Osa Osarenkhoe to build a solution that uses machine learning and time-series forecasting that currover 100 million data points a day.

When ClearCOGS participated in our first virtual Food AI Summit a couple of years ago, Osa and Matt had started experimenting with leveraging large language models (LLMs) like those from OpenAI to create an interface for their forecasting tool. I asked Matt how those experiments with LLMs had gone.

“We did a whole big thing with it… It didn’t go well,” said Wampler. “And it wasn’t from a technical standpoint. It was from the standpoint of the restaurant brands we were talking to… they were like, ‘Look, my general manager can either just get on and play with your AI bot and it’ll tell them, or you can just send it to them? Just send it to them.’”

Wampler said the LLM interface wasn’t the problem. It was just that operators didn’t want to interact with it at all. Instead, they just wanted the answers delivered to them, simply and directly, through email and integrations with solutions from Toast or SevenRooms. This experience reaffirmed Wampler’s belief that proprietary forecasting (and not LLM-powered conversational AI) is where ClearCOGS can deliver the most value.

“LLMs are kind of a commodity at this point. Proprietary data sets are what really matters… You still have to be able to provide a fundamental business value before that AI is really helpful.”

While many platforms offer dashboards or raw analytics, ClearCOGS focuses on delivering direct, decision-ready insights to restaurant managers. This is central to how he differentiates the company:

“If you’re a brand, you probably have 20 or 30 questions that you have to answer every day… We go really deep on those and provide a systematic way of delivering those to your operators every day.”

With the new capital, ClearCOGS plans to accelerate its product development and customer acquisition efforts, with an emphasis of better positioning itself in the food service sector. The company currently serves a customer base of 100 brands in four countries, and Matt says they plan to continue building a lean team, prioritizing automation and AI over headcount.

Bridge Appliances Deploys Egg-Making Robot at First Customer

Five years ago, the cofounders behind Bridge Appliances stood in line at a busy breakfast cafe. As minutes ticked by, frustration turned into inspiration. They wondered: What if the preparation of eggs could be automated? That simple question led to the creation of OMM, a countertop egg-making robot. Now, half a decade later, the Bridge team is back in a coffee shop, deploying their robot for their very first commercial customer, Beantrust Coffeebar in Beverly, Massachusetts.

Bridge cofounder Connor White recently described spending the past two months embedded at Beantrust, collaborating closely with owner Erik Modahl and his team. According to White, working alongside baristas, listening to customers, and absorbing the café’s unique culture and operational flow allowed Bridge to tailor OMM’s integration precisely to Beantrust’s specific needs.

As I wrote last year, OMM cooks two eggs in roughly two minutes, enabling Beantrust to serve around 60 eggs an hour. White notes they’ve already seen promising results, with the new sandwich lineup boosting average ticket values by 15%. Currently, one in five customers chooses to add a freshly made sandwich to their coffee order (and that number continues to climb).

This marks a significant milestone for Bridge, which raised $2 million in seed funding from Steve Papa, one of Toast’s earliest investors, in 2021. Moving forward, Bridge is likely to see more growth among small coffee shops or similar establishments that lack full kitchens or grill cooks but still wish to offer breakfast. However, they will need to raise considerably more funding to scale effectively, or they could be a potential attractive acquisition candidate for a company such as Middleby.

Less Robots, More Meat: Chipotle Founder’s Big Pivot

Just over a year ago, Steve Ells, the founder of Chipotle, opened Kernel in New York City—a vegan restaurant concept featuring a large robotic arm in the kitchen to assist in food preparation.

Given Ells’s pedigree, Kernel received significant attention from news outlets, with many speculating whether it represented the beginning of widespread robotics adoption in restaurants.

However, this speculation was short-lived. A year later, Kernel closed, replaced by a sandwich shop serving roast beef and other traditional sandwich staples—essentially, more meat and fewer robots.

This pivot marks a notable shift for Ells, who just last fall described his automation-heavy restaurant as “the future for the restaurant industry.” Yet by December, Ells had expressed frustration and was already planning a reboot. The revamped concept, now called Counter Service, completely changes the original premise.

Why did Ells shift from viewing robotics as central to restaurants to abandoning the idea entirely within a year? Company COO Tom Cortese, who spoke at The Spoon’s CES Food Tech conference in January, outlined some challenges in an interview with Expedite:

The logistics of installing and maintaining a highly sensitive robot are considerable, Cortese says. Employees need to be properly trained to interact with it, and it introduces a whole new set of safety rules beyond those of a typical restaurant kitchen. Then there’s the challenge of New York real estate:

“The subsurface of some of these floors were built in 1910… now I’m bolting a sensitive piece of robotics to it, and the floor shifts over time. That really messes up a lot of things,” he says.

While Cortese didn’t explicitly mention it, another potential issue was likely the restaurant’s overtly robotic appearance. Ells himself admitted as much in a Gizmodo interview, noting he might have gone “a bit cold” with the initial concept and suggested a need to “warm things up” in future iterations. Evidently, that meant removing the giant Kuka robotic arm.

Ultimately, outside novelty concepts such as Cafe X’s robotic coffee shop, consumers appear uncomfortable with prominent industrial robotic arms dominating open kitchens in casual dining settings. Such robots seem jarring compared to purpose-built food-making robots like Sweetgreen’s Infinite Kitchen or Picnic’s pizza robot.

Ells’s decision to introduce meat to the menu also reflects broader market realities. Despite a decade-long focus on vegan and alternative proteins in food innovation, the majority of Americans remain meat-eaters. While restaurants benefit from offering vegan options, exclusively vegan establishments currently face challenges in attracting broader audiences.

By removing robots and incorporating meat into the menu, Ells is pivoting towards a more traditional concept and betting that the success of his new venture is determined by something the pioneering founder knows something about: the quality of the food itself.

McDonald’s is Creating Virtual ‘AI Managers’ for Its Restaurants

Want some AI with your Big Mac? McDonald’s is about to serve it up in a big way.

According to a story in the Wall Street Journal today, McDonald’s is undergoing a technology overhaul across its 43,000 restaurants, implementing internet-connected kitchen equipment, AI-driven drive-throughs, and tools for managers. McDonald’s is partnering with Google Cloud to deploy edge computing technology, allowing restaurants to analyze data locally rather than sending it to the cloud. This setup helps predict equipment failures—such as fryers or ice cream machines—before they occur and ensures order accuracy through AI-powered cameras.

We’ve written quite a bit at The Spoon about McDonald’s experimentation with AI at the drive-thru, but this story shows they are looking to use generative AI for customer interaction and beyond, including exploring generative AI virtual assistants to handle managerial tasks.

From the WSJ: Edge computing will also help McDonald’s restaurant managers oversee their in-store operations. The burger giant is looking to create a “generative AI virtual manager,” Rice said, which handles administrative tasks such as shift scheduling on managers’ behalf. Fast-food giant Yum Brands’ Pizza Hut and Taco Bell have explored similar capabilities.

This story comes just a day after Taco Bell talked up their own AI initiatives, including their ‘Byte by Yum’ AI tool designed to assist restaurant managers with tasks such as labor and inventory management. The AI can manage schedules, assist with drive-through orders, and suggest operational changes based on competitor activity, aiming to optimize employee efficiency without reducing labor costs.

Lee Kindell on His Journey from Hostel Operator to Building a Fast-Growing Robot-Powered Pizza Chain

Lee Kindell, founder of MOTO Pizza, Seattle’s fastest-growing restaurant chain, never intended to be a restaurateur. In fact, starting a small local pizza joint was more of a retirement plan for when he eventually retired from running a hostel, where he’d cultivated a community atmosphere by taking guests on foraging trips, introducing them to local food, and hosting communal dinners.

According to Kindell, it was during one of these gatherings that someone suggested making pizza, and before long, he became fascinated with the craft of dough preparation. Over time, he learned the nuances of sourdough and grew to love the tactile joy of working with dough, and he would talk to his wife, Nancy, about an eventual far-away plan to retire and run a small pizza restaurant.

But like millions of Americans, the COVID-19 pandemic pushed him into a pivot faster than he anticipated when his hostels closed, and his far-away plan soon became the next thing up. He poured his savings into a 500-square-foot space in Seattle’s West Seattle neighborhood—which they affectionately call “The Up House.” With less than $60,000, Kindell bought used equipment and salvaged furniture from the side of the road, and soon, he soft-launched his little pizza shop. But, in a shock to both Kindell and his wife, a soft launch quickly turned into a viral sensation as bored home-bound customers in the midst of a pandemic lined up around the block after learning about MOTO on social media and from an article in Seattle Eater.

“We went viral on day one,” Kindell said.

From there, MOTO’s reputation grew as Kindell dedicated himself to bettering his craft. He became a hands-on pizzaiolo, mixing dough by hand until an arm injury pushed him to adopt a mixer—a pivotal moment that reshaped his views on scaling. Kindell realized that the mixer didn’t compromise the dough’s quality, and soon, he began exploring other tools, such as conveyor ovens and robotics, to do what he called “scaling craft.”

Moto’s expansion soon took an unexpected turn, landing a coveted spot at the Seattle Mariners Stadium after one day talking to a customer who worked for the team. Kindell pitched his idea to make stadium-friendly, hand-held pizzas, and it wasn’t long MOTO was serving up to 1,400 pizzas per game. Success at T-Mobile Park led to additional opportunities, including the Paribas Tennis Open in Palm Springs, where MOTO served 3,000 pizzas a day during the tournament. “It’s a logistical nightmare,” Kindell said, but he is confident in scaling MOTO nationwide without losing the craft and authenticity that made it special.

Nowadays, MOTO continues to grow (they just opened their first mall location at Bellevue Square) and Kindell has plans to expand nationally and even overseas. There’s no shortage of investor interest, and Kindell and his team plan on taking on more investment next year as they expand their footprint and explore new technology options like drone delivery.

You can watch our full conversation below or listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Taking Chances and Making Pizzas

Meet The Reimagining Restaurants Podcast, and Check Out The First Episode With Wow Bao’s Geoff Alexander

Here at The Spoon, we’ve covered hundreds of restaurant operators over the past half-decade, in part because we love restaurants and restaurant tech, but mostly because restaurant operators are some of the most creative and hard-working entrepreneurs in the food business.

The truth is they have to be. There’s no business changing faster than the world of food service, with the advent of ghost kitchens, digital ordering, automation, and AI, all against a backdrop of high food costs, changing consumer tastes, employee turnover, and more.

All of which is why we’ve decided to start a new podcast focused on entrepreneurs who are finding new ways to run a restaurant in today’s modern world. We wanted to hear their journey into restaurants, hear how they are rethinking how to do business in today’s world, and where they see the restaurant business going in the future.

For our first episode, we knew no one better to discuss approaching the restaurant business in new and innovative ways than Geoff Alexander. The CEO of Wow Bao got his start in hospitality with a college job as a bartender, where he discovered his talent for connecting with people, and he hasn’t looked back.

He joined Lettuce Entertain You shortly after graduation and rose through the ranks over the next three decades, gaining operational expertise and eventually overseeing his own division. In 2009, he took the reins at Wow Bao, where he embraced technology as a way to turn the business around and innovate on new business models. He introduced self-ordering kiosks, mobile ordering, and partnered with third-party delivery platforms early on, which laid the foundation for Wow Bao’s unique model that spans over 500 locations with a mix of virtual kitchens and centralized food production.

Alexander shares insights on Wow Bao’s approach and how a lack of capital fostered a culture of creativity and efficiency. This approach led to successful innovations like centralized production and distribution, which he says has kept cost low while ensuring quality. Alexander also discusses scaling with hot-food vending machines and dipping the company’s toe into the metaverse.

It was a fun episode, and I think you’ll enjoy it. Listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts!

Blackbird Launches Blackbird Pay, a Blockchain-Powered Payment Network

Today Blackbird, a restaurant loyalty startup founded by former Resy and Eater founder Ben Leventhal, announced the launch of Blackbird Pay, a new restaurant payment network.

Powered by the company’s new blockchain, Blackbird Flynet, Blackbird Pay is a payment system that Blackbird says will charge less than traditional payment platforms (2% on average compared to 3.5% for systems such as Toast). The system allows customers to play with the Blackbird app using their debit or credit card within the app, or to use a combination of $FLY (Blackbird’s native loyalty points) and a card.

While the company emerged from the game primarily positioned as a next-gen loyalty platform company, Leventhal told The Spoon that payments have always been on the roadmap.

“We’ve been talking from the very start about the importance of giving restaurants tools to bring fees down to increase the fidelity of the data they get customer to customer,” said Leventhal. “And we strongly believe that pay is a huge part of that equation. We’re launching a payments product that allows restaurants to transfer funds between consumers and restaurants much more cheaply than they can using legacy rails.”

While Blackbird Pay marks the company’s entry into payments, one of its key differentiators is the tools it gives restaurant operators to enhance their loyalty programs. Once the customer taps in using the proprietary Blackbird NFC puck, the restaurant is notified that the guest is a Blackbird member. The customer’s dining profile includes a proprietary Guest Value Score and information about their dining history and VIP status. This enables restaurants to offer personalized perks, benefits, points, exclusive access, and other tailored hospitality options to entice and reward their guests.

In addition to launching Blackbird Pay, the company has also added additional communication features and enhancements around building membership programs. According to the company, Sra. Martinez launched a founding members program prior to its Miami opening, which enabled new members to gain access to tables ahead of reservations opening and receive free cocktails and amuse bouche while dining.

According to Leventhal, the new system isn’t a “rip and replace” for the existing point of sale system, but instead, one that is a ‘net new service.’

“We don’t want to introduce new complexity and introduce a new system that restaurants have to train up on,” said Leventhal. “Blackbird is built to integrate with those systems, and implementation for the restaurant is pretty lightweight.”

While a number of startups that launched during the crypto boom have either scaled back or pivoted, Blackbird has remained focused on utilizing blockchain as an underlying enabler for new features. But, as Levanthal has said from the time of launch, the goal is to enable those new features while making the user experience of customers and restaurants utilizing the platform as simple and abstracted from the underlying technology as possible.

“From a technology standpoint, we are using the blockchain to move tokens from consumer wallets to restaurant wallets,” Leventhal said. “And we’re using the blockchain to do it in a secure and scalable way. And to the extent that consumers care about that, or for that matter, restaurants care about that, you can peel back the onion, so to speak, and explore how that works on the platform. We’re certainly not hiding it. But in terms of the product experience, it’s not front and center.”

You can watch the full conversation with Ben Leventhal in the video below.

The Spoon Talks With Ben Leventhal About The Launch of Blackbird Pay

MOTO Pizza’s Lee Kindell Talks Drone Delivery and Humanoid Robots

Last week at SKS, we had a chance to sit down for an interview with MOTO founder Lee Kindell.

Anyone who’s spent time with Lee knows he’s an enthusiastic proponent of technology, both in his restaurants and in our lives. That’s why it no surprise that he’s embracing drone delivery and hopes to see Zipline drones dropping his craft pizzas on front doors in the Seattle market by the end of this year.

While some of us may have been creeped out by the realness of Figure 01’s speech and ability to hand us fruit, Lee was nothing of the sort and said he expects the speed at which we will adopt robotics into our lives will surprise us.

You can watch our full conversation with Lee below.

MOTO Pizza's Lee Kindell Talks About Building a Fully Automated Pizza Restaurant

MOTO Pizza Teams Up With Cibotica for Salad Bowls, Eyes Expansion into Frozen Pizza for Retail

This week, fast-growing restaurant chain MOTO Pizza announced it will soon add salads to the menu at select locations with the help of Cibotica, a startup specializing in salad and bowl food robots. According to MOTO founder Lee Kindell, the Seattle-based pizza chain will deploy its first Cibotica unit at the chain’s flagship location in the Belltown area of downtown Seattle sometime this summer.

“I went up to their shop in Vancouver and love what they’re doing,” Kindell told the Spoon. “And we’re actually developing my recipes right now for my salad. We’re looking at maybe getting it in here in the next two months.”

The partnership will span up to three years under a robotics-as-a-service operating model and is focused on producing salads for MOTO in various locations. Those future locations could include spots across Southern California. MOTO expanded to the Palm Springs area earlier this year and, according to Kindell, just locked up its first location on the Los Angeles market in the Hollywood Bowl. Kindell told The Spoon that one of the lessons learned over the past year was that a stadium or amphitheater presence (MOTO got into T-Mobile Park last year) can help serve as an expansion point into a metro area.

“What happened with the T Mobile Park is people found us there, and it gave us so much business.”

In addition to adding robot-made salads in some locations and inking more stadium deals, Kindell is exploring ways to freeze his craft pizzas and sell them through the grocery channel. The genesis for exploring the frozen food aisle as an expansion area for his business traces back to an interaction Kindell had with one of his more prolific customers at a MOTO restaurant in Seattle.

“She would order nine or ten pizzas, and I asked, ‘How big is your family?’ She said, ‘It’s just me, my husband, and my son. So I order your pizza and I freeze it.’ I said, ‘You’re kidding me. How is it?’ She said, ‘My son likes it better.'”

Whether it’s through using robots to make his pizza (and now salads), drone delivery, or exploring frozen for expansion into retail, Kindell says there’s one motivating factor behind all of it.

“Like a dog on a bone, I’ve grabbed this idea of scaling craft.”

Kindell will be speaking next week at the Smart Kitchen Summit. Grab your tickets here if you want to meet Kindell in person.

With a Summer Opening In Sight, Flyfish Club Now Letting New Members Join in the Old-School Non-NFT Way

Remember Flyfish Club, the Gary Vaynerchuck-affiliated dining club that made news when it announced it was planning to build the world’s first NFT restaurant?

While you may not, the restaurant industry sure does. After the group raised an impressive $14 million in just weeks by selling tiered memberships via NFT, it seemed everyone started wondering, ‘Could it really be this easy?’ (Editor spoiler: For others, it was not that easy. Copycats proliferated, but none matched the success of Flyfish).

Since the group’s launch over two years ago, Flyfish has been mostly quiet, holding the occasional get-together and trickling out updates. Because of this relative quiet, members were naturally excited last week when Flyfish teased on its Discord that an announcement would be coming on April 5th. And, as it turns out, it was a pretty big announcement.

The group showed off what Gary Vaynerchuk described as a first look at the restaurant, calling the images photos even though some of the images—including the sushi chef—were clearly computer renderings. The renderings looked a lot like almost every Vegas restaurant or lounge I’ve ever been in.

More importantly, though, the announcement provided many more details about membership specifics, some of which the early members found frustrating.

One of those details, which can be seen in this Q&A PDF, is the group has made a fairly significant shift in its approach by letting folks purchase memberships in an old-school, non-Blockchain way. According to Flyfish, prospective members can purchase memberships by paying a one-time entrance fee of $1,500 (no crypto needed) and an annual membership fee of $3,500 ($4,000 if you want membership for yourself and a partner).

Another detail that caused some to bristle was the annual membership fee of $500 for “Blockchain” members (meaning members who entered through buying an NFT). As one Twitter user complained, “The mint was ~$8k in eth at the time, +2yrs of waiting and now we have to pay $500/year to get comp’d $500 in expensive food/drinks. Should be 2-3x that per year to make early backers feel whole.”

My guess is the group decided to become more flexible with membership options because the cost of constructing and operating a restaurant in New York City, as well as paying operating salaries to what is essentially a startup in the Flyfish Club team, is incredibly expensive. It’s also a recognition that while NFT membership is a cool idea that no doubt appeals to the Gary V community, most high-rollers in NYC who usually would pay for a dining club are probably not big NFT enthusiasts. While this will undoubtedly take some of the shine of exclusivity that appealed to the crypto in-crowd when it was first announced, I’m guessing that keeping the restaurant solvent is probably a good long-term thing.

Not all the new details were bummers. One new benefit Flyfish announced is partners are now included. While initially, the blockchain memberships meant only the holder was a member, now they say spouses or partners are also included as members. The group also detailed how membership gave members priority reservation access to other VCR Group (the holding group for Flyfish Club) restaurants.

Of course, none of this actually includes food if you are a non-Blockchain member. After these members pay their dues, no food is included. In other words, it’s pretty much the same as every other dining or country club. It’s mostly the same for blockchain members, though Flyfish will apply their $500 membership as a credit towards meals purchased at the club. Beyond that, though, they’re paying for every meal.

We’ll be in NYC this summer, so hopefully, we’ll be able to get a sneak peek. If one of our readers gets a chance to visit the Flyfish Club, drop us a line (with actual photos) and let us know what you think.

Restaurant Cashier Zooms In to Work, Press Freaks Out. Better Get Ready for Lots More Change at Checkout

This week, a raft of news stories about an encounter with a cashier manning the checkout remotely from a distant location went viral.

Dozens of shock-take articles proliferated after a Google employee named Brett Goldstein stumbled upon the remote cashier in a New York City restaurant called Sansan Chicken and proceeded to breathlessly tweet about it. From there, everyone from Eater to the New York Post covered the story. According to a publication called 404 Media, the company providing the virtual labor is called Happy Cashier.

The dystopian framing is a bit surprising, especially since this type of technology is a smart way to deploy actual human workers in places where they are needed. The decoupling of the requirement for a physical presence to do work for jobs that don’t require physical labor has been underway for years, something many users experienced during the pandemic. This technology coming to the front line of the quick service and convenience formats makes perfect sense.

Add to that the reality that remote cashiers have been zooming into work for at least the last couple of years, as companies like Bite Ninja have been building out both a platform and training a workforce of remote workers to work the register. Originally targeting drive-thrus, Bite Ninja expanded to inside the restaurant over the past couple of years, and last year, they said they had certified over 10,000 remote workers to use the technology.

My guess is that part of the reason the interaction got so much traction is because the remote cashier was zooming in from the Philippines. While it could have just as easily been a mom working from home in Louisiana or an off-duty trucker side-hustling from Minnesota, the fact that it was someone working outside of the US, doing the job of someone who normally would need to be there in person, made the many in the press jump at the story for various reasons.

Here’s the thing, though: the cashier is the easiest employee to replace with technology in the restaurant, something which has been apparent for years as apps, in-store kiosks, and, more recently, AI-powered bots start to take our orders. That it’s a worker from a different country should not be surprising, as we’ve seen jobs like phone customer service largely move overseas over the past decade. At least these platforms, like Bite Ninja, provide an opportunity for human workers because the much bigger story over the next decade will be that a significant portion (if not a majority) of the customer-service front-line jobs will be lost to AI. You need to look no further than that one of the US’s biggest fast food operators has developed (and given a name to) its own generative AI-powered customer service agent.

And voice AI agents are only the beginning. As we saw at CES a couple of years ago, virtual avatars are already stepping onto the front lines of customer service, and some of them even have names. Meet Cecelia the avatar bartender everyone.

The bottom line is that it’s always interesting and instructive to watch how these technologies are perceived in the field by customers. Solutions like digital kiosks are accepted as a convenient and time-saving way to order food, while remote workers being piped in virtually initially may induce shock and wonder, even though it’s probably the least technically challenging of all the solutions emerging.

Customer reactions are important because they will be evaluated by chains that are evaluating new technologies for deployment. While a smaller regional player like Sansan Chicken may be comfortable as early adopters of a remote cashier at the main checkout counter, don’t expect bigger chains to deploy these widely until they feel their customers will be okay with the change.

Watch as This Robot Pizza Chain Operator Breaks Down the Cost Each Part of the Pizza-Making Process

For small operators (and big ones as well) in the pizza business, Andrew Simmons’s posts on Linkedin have become must-read material.

That’s because Simmons, who I wrote about last year as he experimented with utilizing pizza automation technology in his San Diego area restaurant, has open-sourced his learnings as he continues experimenting with various forms of technology. And boy, is he experimenting!

And it’s not just automation (though that’s a big part). He’s constantly tinkering with every part of his restaurant tech stack as he expands beyond his original restaurant and looks to create a nationwide chain of tech-powered pizza restaurants. Add in the fact that he’s utilizing a crowdfunding model in which he sells subscriptions and a share of future pizza profits, and Simmons has created a live in-process testing lab for how to build a next-gen pizza chain that everyone can learn from.

One example of his highly detailed learnings that I found fascinating is his post today detailing the cost-per-pizza after allocating the costs of the different pizza-making automation he’s deployed in one of his restaurants. The video, seen below, shows how much each part of the process — dough making, doughball prep, dough-pressing, toppings allocation — costs and how he arrives at a 2024 price-per-pie of $1.91.

Simmons details how he’s tinkered with different automation systems over the past year and how they’ve impacted the price. One change he’s tinkered with is switching out the Picnic pizza robot for a Middleby Pizza Bot, which is more expensive but handles more of the pizza-making process and requires less human intervention.

From Simmons’s post:

Last year, the financial model was built using the Picnic Pizza Station. It was more expensive last year than it is today. This year, I’ve incorporated The Middleby Corporation Automation tool into the equation, but either unit could work. Middleby is a little more costly, adding about 60¢ to the per pizza estimate, but it takes the pizza from dough blank to cooked, whereas the Picnic requires some intervention to cook it. Picnic runs about 38¢ per pizza this year.

Simmons points to recent changes in California’s employment laws as one motivator for his becoming an early adopter of these solutions, saying that the changes will lead to more restaurant chains experimenting with automation.

“Thank you to the pioneers in this space that have tried, adopted, succeeded or failed, equipment manufacturers and restaurateurs alike; and to Governor Newsom, for accelerating adoption of automation,” wrote Simmons.

You can (and I suggest you do) follow Simmons’s posts about his journey to build a robotic restaurant chain on Linkedin.