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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

PAZZI

French Robot Pizza Restaurant Startup Pazzi Shuts its Doors

Another robot pizza startup has shut down.

According to an email sent to The Spoon, the Paris-based startup had seen its assets liquidated by a French court. The company, which had attempted to find a buyer, closed the doors of its two restaurants last Monday and will lay off its remaining 35 employees in the coming days.

It’s a sad ending for one of the robotic restaurant industry’s earliest startups. The company, which started as EKIM and worked on its technology for the better part of a decade, opened the doors on its first restaurant a little over a year ago in Beaubourg in Paris, France after running a pilot in the Paris suburb of Marne-la-Vallée starting in 2019. The company would raise over €12M in funding.

In a post written on Linkedin, Pazzi CEO Philippe Goldman said he felt the company ultimately didn’t survive in large part due to a combination of an immature French hardware startup ecosystem and a mistrust of robotics by the general public.

…”the hardware eco-system in France is immature and insufficient both in terms of public and institutional funding, the valuation of industrial or robotic nuggets is low vs. a dominant software culture and there is a general mistrust of the population towards robotics, condemned to steal only jobs,” wrote Goldman.

The news is the latest in what’s been a string of bad news on the pizza robotics front. In May we got news of Basil Street taking final bids on their assets, and in July The Spoon broke the news that the OG pizza vending machine startup Pizzametry was looking for a buyer.

Pazzi Opens Robotic Pizza Restaurant in Paris

Pazzi announced earlier this week that it has opened its first official robotic pizza restaurant in Beaubourg in Paris, France. This is the second robot pizza restaurant for the company, following a pilot facility it opened in a Parisian suburb in 2019.

Dubbed the “Pazziria,” the almost fully autonomous kiosk uses robotic arms to and other bits of automation to flatten dough, apply sauce and toppings, places pizzas in the oven and slice and box them up. The Pazzi robots are able to prepare a pizza in 45 seconds, can bake six pizzas at a time and produce 80 pizzas per hour.

The robots are fully enclosed behind a wall of glass and there are no humans helping out. Orders can be placed via web app or touchscreen kiosk at the restaurant. Customers can watch as the robots whirl about making each pizza, and can retrieve their order from a marked cubby.

There is a question with every food robot startup over whether to make their machines look more like “robots” by using articulating arms, or to make them more like industrial machines where the automation is more hidden away. Other players in the robot pizza space such as xRobotics, Middleby and Picnic are all definitely on the more industrial side. Their machines are meant to be tucked away in kitchens, cranking out pizzas and are not on display for customers.

Pazzi is going a different direction than those other companies and leaning into the theatricality of its robots. Like the Creator restaurant (RIP), Pazzi places its robots front and center and fully visible to customers and passers by. The homepage of Pazzi’s website is even splashed with “Come for the show, stay for the pizza.”

There’s actually never been a better time for Pazzi to launch its robo-restaurant. The pandemic, which is still very much a part of our lives around the world, has restauranteurs and customers looking for more contactless ways of food prep and delivery. Since Pazzi uses robots, there is not human-to-human contact making and selling pizzas. Pazzi’s robots can also run continuously without taking a break. (They are monitored remotely should anything break down.) Pazzi’s robots also means that it doesn’t have to hire, train and pay human workers, which is good for Pazzi’s bottom line. That, however, also means there are fewer jobs, creating complex socio-economic quandaries that still need to be worked out.

With two sites now up and running in France, Pazzi is eyeing international expansion and says it will be opening a location in Switzerland (perhaps next to a Smyze drinks station?). For those in Paris looking wanting to try out this robo-pizza, Pazziria Beaubourg is located at 42 Rue Rambuteau, and is open seven days a week from 11 a.m. to midnight.

A Roundup of Pizza Robots

To borrow from The White Stripes, “I’ve said it once before but it bears repeating now.” If you want to know the future of food tech, look at what’s happening in pizza.

Because of its ubiquity, relative ease to make, and transportability (i.e. great for delivery!), pizza is a perfect food when it comes to testing out new technologies across the meal journey.

One technology in particular being applied to pizza making is robotics. Automated pizza making appears to be all the rage nowadays with a number of players heating up the space. Here’s a quick rundown of the key companies bringing robotics to the world of pizza:

PICNIC
Funding: $20.7 million
Solution: Picnic makes a modular system of robots that precisely apply toppings like cheese, pepperoni and more to pre-formed dough. Picnic’s robot can assemble 300 pies in an hour that are cooked separately, and just last week the company debuted its second-gen robot, which provides greater visibility into the machine. Picnic’s solution isn’t just for pizza, however, it can also be used to assemble foods like burritos and Subway-style sandwiches.

MIDDLEBY/Lab 2 Fab
Funding: Publicly traded
Solution: Middleby’s Lab 2 Fab publicly debuted its new PizzaBot 5000 at our Smart Kitchen Summit last month. The enclosed cabinet robot applies three base ingredients (e.g. sauce, cheese, pepperoni), and can assemble a pizza in under a minute, where it can be moved by a human or a robot into an oven. The PizzaBot 5000 will go into beta in early 2021.

PIESTRO
Funding: completed $1 million in equity crowdfunding, seeking another $5 million
Solution: Piestro is a new startup looking to build a robotic pizza vending machine. The planned machine can accept orders through a mobile app and deliver a hot pizza in under three minutes. The company also recently announced a partnership with Kiwibot that allows that company’s eponymous delivery robot to retrieve pizzas from Piestro and deliver them to customers.

PAZZI
Funding: €12.2 million (~$14.9M USD)
Solution: Of all the companies listed here, PAZZI’s (formerly EKIM) pizza maker is the more “robotic,” with multiple articulating arms that top the pizza, put it in the oven, remove a slice it. PAZZIs are roughly 45 sq. meters and meant to be automated standalone kiosks. The first PAZZI went live in France last year.

This list doesn’t even include the pizza vending machines that are popping up from API Tech, Basil St. and Bake Xpress. We didn’t formally include those in this roundup because they are just re-heating frozen pizzas, not performing a series of different tasks to create a pizza on the spot.

With its universal appeal (who doesn’t like pizza?), pizza will remain a medium that pushes food technology forward that other types of cuisine will benefit from.

EKIM Raises €10M for Autonomous Robot Pizza Restaurant, Rebrands as PAZZI

Given its rich culinary history, France might not be the first place to come to mind when thinking about autonomous restaurant chains, but French robot-pizza restaurant PAZZI (formerly known as EKIM) may change all that. Today PAZZI announced it has raised a €10 million (~$11.2M USD) Series A round of funding led Singaporean investment fund Qualgro. This brings the total amount raised by PAZZI €12.2M Euros (~$13.68M USD).

PAZZI creates small autonomous, robot-powered pizza restaurants. At roughly 45 square meters, the PAZZI concept is something between a large automated kiosk (like the Blendid robot) and full-on regular-sized restaurant. Shoppers order and customize their pizzas via touchscreen, which a three-armed robot makes, slides in and out of an oven, and slices — all without humans. According to this promotional video, PAZZI can make a pizza every 30 seconds.

Comment Pazzi réinvente la restauration ? [FORMAT 1MIN]

PAZZI is opening up its first location to the public in Montevrain, France on June 24, and the company told us in an email that the new money will “accelerate the development of its technology.”

We aren’t aware of too many other robot restaurants in France, but PAZZI is certainly not alone in launching an autonomous restaurant experiences. As we learned at our Articulate conference earlier this year, robots are good for repetitive (applying sauce and cheese to dough) and dangerous (working a hot oven) restaurant tasks.

Here in the U.S., robo-restaurants are starting to sprout up. Boston-based Spyce raised $21 million to expand its presence, Caliburger and Creator both have robots making burgers, and Cafe X and Briggo are broadening their robo-barista footprint. Over in China, Alibaba has Robot.he and the Haidilao hotpot chain wants to launch thousands of robot restaurants. (For more, check out our food robot market map!)

PAZZI seems to have equally large ambitions, and with its small footprint, and 24 hour capabilities, its robot seems perfect for malls, offices, airports and other high-traffic areas where speed is as important as taste.

With its new funding, we’ll see if PAZZI can scale its operations, without sacrificing any flavor.

EKIM Raises €2.2M for PAZZI the Pizza Robot

If someone were to update The Graduate for modern audiences, it seems like instead of “plastics,” the one word for Benjamin Braddock would be (… are you listening?…) “robots.” Especially if young Braddock wanted to get into the food business.

Pizza-making robots in particular are proving quite popular. Zume has one. Little Caesar’s has a patent for one. And now France, home of brie and baguettes, is getting its own pizza-making robot.

According to EU-Startups, French startup EKIM just raised €2.2 million (~$2.6M USD) to fund the creation of PAZZI, a small, autonomous pizza-making robot restaurant. This was the first institutional funding for the company, and Daphni and Partech were the investors.

Details are slim as the EKIM site is in French, but EU-Startups reports that the PAZZI concept fits in a 45 sq. meter area and has gone through a four year development process. In addition to pizza, PAZZI will offer “drinks, desserts and salads” (and, since this is France, one would presume wine). A pilot project will start in France at the end of this year, and then will be franchised out in 2019.

Even beyond pizza, robots are being recruited throughout the restaurant world. Spyce Kitchen just opened up their robot restaurant in Boston. Bear Robotics’ food-shuttling “Penny” showed off its stuff at the National Restaurant Association show this week. Meanwhile, Cafe X and Briggo robots are slinging coffee, while Blendid whips up smoothies.

But all of those operations are going on in the U.S. It’s interesting to think about how European audiences will react to automation. Here in America, we’re used to mass-produced, mass-marketed food. But European countries like France are steeped in proud culinary traditions full of artisan, handmade products. Will European audiences take to robot-produced food?

Because France isn’t the only one on a quest to automate pizza. Down in Italy, researchers strapped a biokinetic suit onto famed pizza maker Enzo Coccia to teach a robot how to make pizza like a master.

Perhaps I’m painting with too broad a brush. People are people, as the song goes. If the food is good and convenient, why not have it prepped by a machine? There does indeed seem to be a great future in robots, to complete this Graduate reference. Hopefully some pizza (or robot) fans in Europe can set me straight in person at our Smart Kitchen Summit in Dublin, Ireland next month.