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.
