Seattle-based Picnic Works announced today that its Pizza Station robot will be heading to college this fall as part of an expanded pilot program with college food service company Chartwells Higher Education. The pilot will include five colleges: Texas A&M, the University of Chicago, Missouri State University, Carroll University, and Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis.
The rollout of the pizza robot follows a successful eight-week pilot of Picnic’s Pizza Station at Texas A&M. According to Picnic, during the initial pilot, the robot at Texas A&M made over 4,500 pizzas and enabled the kitchen staff to reallocate 8 hours of kitchen worker time per day to other tasks.
The origin story of Picnic’s enrollment at Texas A&M goes back to COVID when Chartwell’s district executive chef Marc Cruz couldn’t find enough workers to staff the pizza makeline and often found himself in the kitchen making pizza by himself. After someone at food service supplier Rich’s suggested that Cruz and his team check out Picnic, it wasn’t too long before the startup installed its robot in College Station, Texas.
The Chartwell deal is a smart move for Picnic and is another sign that the battle to lock up partnership deals with large food service management companies is heating up. Earlier this year, we wrote about Dexai’s trial with Gordon’s and have been covering Kiwibot’s deployment of over two hundred robots across ten campuses through partner Sodexo. Chartwell operates over 300 college and university “dining environments,” so it’s not hard to see how the business could grow over time for Picnic if they achieve similar results in the new additions under the expanded pilot this fall.
The Chartwell deal follows news of Picnic’s partnership with Speedy Eats, a Lousianna-based startup that builds automation-powered restaurants-in-a-box in parking lots and other locations. The company is working with Picnic to incorporate the Pizza Station as part of their automated kitchen setup.
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