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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Andrew Simmons

Andrew Simmons Shares Lessons Learned as He Launches New Pizza Subscription Platform

A couple of years ago, Andrew Simmons had big plans for his restaurant subscription business.

And why not? After experimenting with a wide range of technologies in a San Diego-area pizza restaurant, Simmons had launched a pizza subscription model that helped him generate $30,000 in a single-day Black Friday sale. Confident in his approach, he figured he could replicate the model in new markets.

But as it turns out, expansion proved more difficult than expected. According to Simmons, the challenge wasn’t the technology or the concept of subscriptions; it was moving too quickly into markets where his restaurants hadn’t yet built relationships with local diners.

“We believed that the pizza subscription program would carry us through,” said Simmons. “But when you move into a brand new market where nobody knows your brand, it doesn’t really matter what you’re offering until people have a chance to try your food and try it for a while.”

The subscription idea was simple: sell a year’s worth of pizza upfront. Customers could purchase a plan, like $197 for 52 pizzas, and redeem one each week. It created recurring revenue and served as a buffer against unpredictable walk-in traffic.

While the concept didn’t translate as well in new locations, Simmons believes it could work for restaurant operators who already have a strong local following. That’s why he’s launched a new venture and website to help established restaurants offer their own subscription plans.

He says the key to a successful subscription business goes beyond the initial funding. Operators need to manage the funds wisely, track redemptions and subscriber communications, and plan inventory accordingly. His new platform is designed to handle all of that.

“This is crowdfunding meets foodservice,” Simmons said. “You raise money upfront, but you also take on the responsibility to deliver that product across 52 weeks. You have to be smart. Or you’ll crash the car.”

You can listen to my full conversation with Andrew to hear about his plans for his subscription business below or on The Spoon Podcast.

Andrew Simmons Reflects on Past Year, Talks New Pizza Subscriptions Platform

Meet PZZA, the Latest Pizza Robot Built by a Rocket Scientist

So what’s the deal with rocket scientists and pizza?

No, that’s not a Jerry Seinfeld punch-line setup, but an actual question I have after seeing Andrew Simmon’s recent post on Linkedin about the latest pizza robot he’s stumbled across. Simmons, who’s made a name for himself documenting his learnings as he tinkers with his restaurant chain tech stack, wrote about a new pizza robot named, well, PZZA.

According to Simmons, the PZZA robot, which automates saucing, adding cheese and toppings, and cooking the pizza, was designed by long-time aerospace engineer Omid Nakhjavani. Nakhjavani, who worked on NASA space travel projects for Boeing over a decade ago (and apparently still works for Boeing), has been perfecting his pizza robot for seven years and hopes to ship it later this year.

Readers of The Spoon might remember another pizza robot built by rocket scientist Benson Tsai. After building a combo pizza robot and food truck called Stellar Pizza, the former Space X engineer sold his company this March to Hanwha Foodtech. Hanwha Foodtech, a subsidiary of Korean conglomerate Hanwha, plans to launch a pizza chain built around Stellar’s technology in both the US and South Korea.

Before PZZA and Stellar, rocket scientist Anjan Contractor built a pizza 3D printing robot for NASA in the early aughts as part of a contract awarded to aerospace systems subcontractor SMRC. From there, Contractor went on to launch his own startup, BeeHex, focused on building robotic food printing systems.

That there seems to be a fairly robust rocket scientist to pizza robot founder career pipeline shouldn’t be all that surprising, in that a) the mechanical engineering discipline is foundational to both rocket and robot building, and b) engineers love pizza.

Nakhjavani’s engineering mindset influenced some of the design choices for the PZZA robot, including the shape of the pizzas. His robot makes rectangular and square pizzas, in part because—as Simmons recounts—”round pizzas are not efficient and waste things like boxes by being square.”

You can check out the video of the PZZA in action below and read more about its specs on its website.

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.

Podcast: How One Operator is Reinventing His Restaurant With Technology

When Andrew Simmons decided to buy a restaurant in January 2020, little did the long-time entrepreneur know that in just a few months, he would be forced to close his doors due to COVID. 

But instead of giving up, he knew he had to get creative to survive. Survive he did, and when he reopened his doors, he kept tinkering, trying to figure out how new technology could make his restaurant more efficient. 

Andrew’s been an open book during the process, open-sourcing his learning as he navigates his journey via posts on Linkedin and a blog. He shares what works and what doesn’t, providing a potential blueprint for other operators thinking about how technology could change their business. 

During this podcast, Andrew and Mike talk about:

  • How the installation of a pizza robot from Picnic completely changed how he does business
  • How one piece of game-changing technology, like a pizza robot, forces other changes and adoption of new technology throughout the restaurant’s workflow
  • The impact of new technology on his unit price for pizzas 
  • How analytics software helped him realize his dine-in business was not profitable and how it changed his thinking about how he ran his restaurant
  • How he was forced to rethink how he used employees through the use of technology and how the employees (and former employees) have reacted
  • His pizza subscription concept and how he believes it can help him pay for opening new restaurants
  • Andrew’s plans to launch a 100-unit restaurant chain built using off-the-shelf restaurant technology

If you are considering using technology such as robotics for your restaurant, this episode is a must-listen! You can listen to the conversation on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or click play below.

This Beloved Pizza Joint is Reinventing Itself With Robotics and a $149-a-Year Subscription Program

Andrew Simmons and Wayne Stadler acquired Mamma Rosa’s Italian restaurant in January 2020.

The two, which cofounded a restaurant delivery service startup called Orange Crate, had learned through social media the restaurant’s owner, Mindy Arbaca, was planning on closing the beloved restaurant’s doors and quickly convinced her to sell it to them.

The two took ownership and reopened under the name Mamma Ramona’s, spending the next couple of years learning how to operate a restaurant while navigating through a pandemic.

One lesson both learned quickly is that operating a restaurant is very different from running a delivery startup. While Simmons loved it, Stadler wanted to focus more closely on the delivery business. Eventually, Simmons bought his partner out.

Since then, Simmons has gone about modernizing his pizza restaurant from the bottom up with technology, changing everything from the restaurant’s point-of-sale technology to its loyalty system software to the ovens it uses to cook pizzas.

And, oh yeah, robots. In the front of house, Simmons deployed a Dinerbot T5 server robot which he says is extremely useful for offloading the heavy tugging of big food orders to tables and to help with bussing.

“Delivering all eight orders to a table at the same time is worth its weight in gold,” Simmons told The Spoon. “No running back and forth to the kitchen. And, we can turn tables faster because we can send plates back to the dishwasher minutes after a guest leaves, thereby turning the table faster.”

He also brought robotics into the back of house, deploying a pizza-making robot from Picnic. According to Simmons, the Picnic can ramp up to a potential pizza output of 130 pizzas per hour.

This extra pizza-making capacity meant Simmons had to invest in new pizza ovens – he’s purchased a couple of TurboChef ovens, each enabling his cooks to cook a pie in 90 seconds – and more refrigerators to hold the dough.

But the Picnic also helped him lower the cost of his pizzas, not only because of increased speed and lower labor costs but also due to a more predictable application of increasingly expensive ingredients like cheese. Simmons says his cost per 12″ pepperoni pie for each Picnic-made pizza is $2.65. With non-automation, he says his price per pie is almost $2 higher.

“With the Picnic, I can produce 500 pies a shift,” said Simmons. “We do on a really good day about 200. With non-automation, scoops of cheese, and labor being California wages, around $4.35 each, but no way we could ever keep up with the speed of the Picnic.”

Another benefit of faster pizza production and a lower cost per pie is it’s enabled Simmons to launch a subscription program. The program, which sounds like a college student’s dream come true, is $149 per year and gives a subscriber 52 weeks of pizza, or one pizza per week. While that may seem like a lot of pizza for less than $3 a week, Simmons says that it turns out more members don’t come in every week, and when they do, they usually add on extras like drinks, appetizers, and even extra pizzas.

It also allows him to front-load revenue and bring in new customers, essential in the margin-constrained business of running a restaurant. When Simmons ran a $99-per-year Black Friday deal last November, he sold enough memberships to account for 15,548 pizzas, nearly equal to the number of pizzas he sold in 2022. According to Simmons, 70% of the membership subscribers were new or infrequent customers of Mama Ramona’s.

Of course, all this new technology takes some time to get used to, especially for staff used to doing things the old way. Simmons says some still prefer making pizzas the old way without automation, and some were worried when he first introduced the Rosie – the name they’ve given the server robot – that robots might replace them. According to Simmons, one server refused to work with Rosie and no longer works at the restaurant.

But over time, the workers have adapted. According to Simmons, he recently received a panicked call from his lead server who told him Rosie was “was DOA in the hallway when she got to work.”

He told her to roll Rosie back onto the charger, where she could charge back up again.

“A few hours later, she was ready to go, just a little late to her start time.”

If you’d like to hear Andrew talk about his experiences implementing robotics and other technology at his restaurant, he’ll be a speaker at our Food Robotics 2023 virtual event on Wednesday, March 1st. Get your free ticket here.