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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Fast-Growing Restaurant Chain MOTO Pizza Is Building an End-to-End Pizza Robot

Last month in Las Vegas, we sat down with one of our favorite restaurateurs, Lee Kindell of MOTO Pizza, to discuss his vision for the future of restaurants. Lee was in town to speak onstage at CES about the industry’s direction, so we made sure to catch up with him for a one-on-one interview.

One revelation that surprised us during our conversation was that MOTO is developing an end-to-end pizza robot—one that automates the entire process, from dough preparation to boxing the finished pizza.

“Our robot is going to be fully autonomous,” Kindell explained. “It takes the pizza from refrigeration, brings it out, proofs it, tops it, cooks it, finishes it, cuts it, and boxes it. So that’s what we’re building right now. It’s truly end-to-end, and that’s what excites me the most.”

As someone who loves both pizza and robotics, I was intrigued by MOTO’s move to develop its own technology. To clarify, I asked Kindell directly about his plans. He confirmed that MOTO is indeed building a fully automated pizza-making solution—one that could potentially integrate with existing automation partners, such as Picnic (Picnic’s pizza robot adds sauce, cheese, and toppings but doesn’t handle cooking, cutting, or boxing).

MOTO has been expanding rapidly, entering new cities and sports venues. Kindell, who started as a hands-on pizzaiolo mixing dough by hand, became a firm believer in automation after an arm injury forced him to adopt a mixer. That moment reshaped his perspective—he realized that automation wasn’t just about efficiency; it was a tool to scale his business while maintaining quality.

Now, Kindell and MOTO are taking that mindset a step further, developing an end-to-end pizza robot to help the fast-growing chain keep up with demand and reach more customers than ever before.

You can watch our full conversation below.

Moto's Lee Kindell on Using AI & Robotics to Make Pizza

Scoop: Kalanick’s Latest Idea for Disrupting Food May Be No-Fee Bulk Food Delivery & Automated Pick-Up Kiosks

When Travis Kalanick showed up at the Food on Demand conference this past May, technology and restaurant industry insiders could hardly believe it.

After all, the Uber cofounder had gained an almost Howard Hughes-like reputation for secrecy over the past decade, saying nary a word publicly over the years while journalists and Internet sleuths searched for digital breadcrumbs about what exactly he was up to with CloudKitchens, a business under which he had quietly built the biggest network of dark kitchen/ghost kitchen facilities in the country.

But unlike the eccentric aerospace and film magnate who spent his days toggling between locking himself away in screening rooms and crashing planes, Kalanick made clear on stage in Las Vegas last month that he’s been busy building a new business empire focused on reimagining the world of restaurants and food delivery.

“Can you do to the kitchen what Uber did to the car?” he asked. From there, Kalanick painted a vision of how the companies he’d assembled under his City Storage Systems holding company would do things differently. He suggested the sum total of his collected companies – such as shared/dark kitchens (CloudKitchens), Point of Sale software (Otter), and restaurant automation (Lab37) – could power a more efficient way of doing business than the disjointed, expensive, and fee-ridden state the restaurant and food delivery business had evolved into over the past decade.

It was during his talk that Kalanick talked up the idea of an ‘Intenet Food Court,’ where customers could get a hyper-personalized experience and order any type of food within 15 minutes. To realize that vision, Kalanick said food production and logistics would need to be automated, and his company was building the necessary infrastructure under City Storage Systems to deliver that.

“We paint where this all goes, but there’s a road to get there and we call it infrastructure for better food,” he continued. “That’s the mission of my company.”

Kalanick’s refererence to the concept of an Internet or digital food court was not the first signal from him or his company about the concept. In fact, in 2020, the company launched what it described as an Internet food court in the LA market, where it would aggregate all the food operators in the Koreatown facility and offer multi-tenant ordering. They even had a website URL, Internetfoodcourt.co. However, as of April 2020, the site had gone dead, and CloudKitchens had scrubbed its Internet presence of the term.

But then, in March of this year, the company started talking digital food courts again. That month, it posted a story on its blog about the launch of a Picnic-branded digital food court platform in Chicago. The location, which was formerly called Avondale Food Pickup before it was renamed Picnic, featured what the post described as a new digital platform that would enable a customer to order food on a new website (picnicfood.com) or in person via a kiosk or a human worker and then they would be able to pick up the food via a pick-up locker.

The pickup kiosk can be seen below:

The website for this Picnic shows you can ask for delivery or pickup, and currently the only location for pickup is the Chicago address in Avondale, and a Google search seems to indicate this was the first and only time Kalanick’s company had used the Picnic branding and the concept of a digital food hall since 2020.

And then earlier this week, what appears to be another version of the same Picnic company (same logo, different website) showed up on Linkedin and talked up a new platform concept in the Los Angeles market. The pitch? A ‘digital food hall’ and fee-free multi-brand delivery of food to different places of business or residential multi-family units. The concept, which is explained in the video below, is essentially bulk orders to various office buildings, schools, or wherever hungry people convene together each day.

According to the explainer video and the website, a Picnic “activation” starts with a location manager or employee/resident applying to be a Picnic delivery location. Once accepted, Picnic will put what it describes as a Picnic “shelf” at the location where the different individual meals are placed during a delivery.

This new Picnic doesn’t state anywhere on its website or on Linkedin that it’s a part of City Storage Systems’ network. The website‘s FAQ describes the company as a product of coworkers in the California market “who realized that it’s nearly impossible to find consistent lunch options that have variety,” and when The Spoon reached someone via a number found on the company’s Linkedin page, the person told us the company was not associated with CloudKitchens or City Storage Systems.

But we are confident it is for a couple of obvious reasons: Not only does it use the same logo as the CloudKitchens Picnic offering in Chicago, but the location’s address at 777 S Figueroa in Los Angeles is listed in multiple locations as being the same address as City Storage Systems.

Which, of course, raises all sorts of questions. For example, is this version of Picnic – a platform for bulk-ordered delivery of food to places of work and multi-family living – going to be the next big idea from Kalanick’s company? And does this mean the company is building out its own delivery network? And will Kalanick & Co roll out the digital food court and automated pick-up kiosks (such as that in Picnic Chicago) to its other ghost kitchen locations across the country?

A new delivery network would certainly be an interesting move for a founder who is largely responsible for not only reshaping personalized transportation with Uber and building the infrastructure for one of the biggest third party meal delivery companies in UberEats.

Finally, it also needs to be asked: Why Picnic? There are already a couple other Picnics in the food tech space, including Picnic in Seattle which makes pizza robots, and the grocery tech startup named Picnic out of The Netherlands. It seems like a curious move, especially since the US Trademark office awarded a trademark to the Seattle-based Picnic (their corporate name is Picnic Works) to use the term Picnic.

If you have any insights or leads on what else City Storage Systems is planning to do with its Picnic platform (either the centralized pickup Internet food hall concept or the bulk-delivery concept), drop us a line.

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.

SKS 2024 Preview: Clayton Wood Talks The Current State of Food Robotics

We’re just one month away from the Smart Kitchen Summit, so we’re going to be checking and hearing from some of our speakers.

First up is Clayton Wood, a long-time entrepreneur who has been navigating the food robotics market for the last five years, first as the CEO of Picnic (which debuted its robot at SKS 2019), talking about the challenges and opportunities he sees in this market. You can watch the full interview by clicking play below or read some of the highlights in the transcript below.

The Spoon Talks to Food Robotics Entrepreneur Clayton Wood.

Michael Wolf: I imagine that a lot of startups in the food robotics space are probably wanting to get your advice because you ran one of the early pretty successful food robotics companies with Picnic. Talk about some of the conversations you’re having and maybe some of the, are there early stage entrepreneurs in the space that are coming to you say, hey, we have an idea.

Clayton Wood: Absolutely. I started getting inbound interest in being an advisor as soon as I left Picnic, a little over a year ago. I’ve talked to a large number of companies in the space. Many of them are at the same spot, which, given market conditions, isn’t too surprising, which is they’ve got an idea. They’ve probably got a product or a prototype, having trouble raising their first round, having trouble finding product market fit. And just trying to make that leap into kind of being a more mature company. It’s a tough spot under any circumstances, but in market conditions, the last few years have made it especially difficult.

Michael Wolf: One of the things about food robotics is it’s a long path to getting into market. It’s a lot of capital. And with the venture capital winter that is seemingly lasting forever, it seems like a tough time for food robotics companies.

Clayton Wood: It very much is. I know at Picnic, we started in what I finally refer to as the free money era, where you raised one round just to get to the next round, and raising money wasn’t really that much of a question. Now it’s a huge problem. The challenge that food robotics companies have specifically is that as the market tightened up, it became very conservative, and conservative investors don’t like hardware in general.

Food tech is seen as a challenging category of hardware. So if you’re looking at, you know, show me when you’re cashflow positive, show me when you’re profitable. It’s very, very difficult as a food hardware company to show that because it’s such a new field. Product market fit is elusive and being able to say when that those financial metrics will turn right side up is really challenging. It’s just a really tough time for all startups, but I think food robotics, food hardware is especially a challenging category, and has been for the last two or three years.

Michael Wolf: One of the things about Picnic was I felt like it was a next-generation pizza food robotics company and that it was purpose-built around building pizzas. It wasn’t one of these where someone got a general-purpose robotic arm and would just move things around within a confined space. And you’re still seeing those sometimes. What are some of the if you’re giving advice to a food robotics company in terms of building out a system and thinking it through what ultimately may succeed in the market, what would you tell them?

Clayton Wood: Yes.I think it’s one of those signs, you’re absolutely right about the arms and the big footprints. It’s one of those signs of a new, immature market. People haven’t seen food robotics, they don’t know what to think about it. We had people at trade shows looking at the Picnic robot and they’re in the pizza business, and they’re watching it make a pizza and they’re going, ‘does it make the pizza?’ It’s really hard to just wrap their head around it.

I think the challenge, it’s common to a lot of technology companies, but especially true in food robotics, you’ve got to start with the customer. What’s the customer’s pain point, and what can they actually use? And unfortunately, not uncommonly, people start with ‘what can my product do?’ and ‘how can I make it do it in a real fancy, impressive way and how fast can it do it or that sort of thing?’

Those numbers are nice and you get people excited, but it’s not really what the customer needs. And ultimately, the real challenge in food robotics is integration. How will your device get integrated into a commercial kitchen so that the kitchen can continue to operate, do what it needs to do, and do it without disrupting the process? And until there are new concepts that are really built around automation and those are starting to emerge. I used to say no one who has a kitchen has a pizza robot sized hole in their kitchen that they’re just waiting to plug it in.

Michael Wolf: You know, there are a couple of founders out there on the smaller side that I think are innovating. They’re not a big chain. So you see like Andrew Simmons, which I think you talk a lot with. You see Lee Kindell up here in Seattle with Moto. And I imagine there are others that are showing how you can be a smaller operator and almost build your new restaurant concept around utilizing kind of off-the-shelf robotics. It’s not like a Zume, where they raised hundreds of millions of dollars from Softbank and say, ‘Hey, we’re going to build our own robot, do this custom thing.’ These smaller operators are taking a system like Picnic’s and saying, ‘Hey, we’re going to build a new concept that is essentially centered around automation and kind of move forward.’ I feel like they’re pioneering in a sense. Do you think that’s going to be what we’re going to see in the future, more people pioneering concepts that are leveraging automation because they think that can help them scale better?

Clayton Wood: I love to see that. I think Andrew and Lee are brilliant, and I’d say, you know, they’re unfortunately they’re at the far end of the open-minded innovator scale. They’re both kind of willing to move things around and try things, and they’re not just open to innovation, but they embrace it and they seek it out. I don’t think that’s really the persona that I’d use to describe most people in the restaurant business.

If you have that kind of open -minded approach, there’s all kinds of things you could do and you can adapt. If you don’t want to adapt, you say, this is the way I do things. Can you help me? That’s where you run into an integration challenge. But I think what I love about what Lee is doing at Moto and what Andrew is doing with Mama Ramona’s Pizza Roboto is they’re showing how it can work. They’re sharing real world experiences.

Andrew is doing his whole build -in public diary on LinkedIn, which I think is brilliant and super useful because he’s sharing the wins and the losses. But it shows that it can work, you’ve just got to adapt. And I think that’s a lot of the product market fit in these early days is about adapting on both sides. The customer has to be willing to adapt a little bit and the product companies have to go in realizing that regardless of what they may think, they haven’t built a perfect machine and they need to be willing to tweak and change and reconfigure to make the best fit.

Michael Wolf: Okay, you’ve been in this business for half a decade now, you’re advising companies. What are you excited about in terms of food robotics? And are there spaces you think you’d like to see more entrepreneurs or inventors go in terms of building automation around food?

Clayton Wood: I’ve seen some in the home space as well as the restaurant space who are starting out with products that already solve some of the challenges that we’ve seen really block some of the earlier companies. Building devices that are drop-in replacements for a make line, for instance. Acknowledging the fact that if you have the way a restaurant operates, workers are seldom just dedicated to a station standing there all day. The automation needs to work even if the person is only giving intermittent attention. You need to see things like a holding station where if you’re making 10 salads a minute, well, if there’s nobody there to catch the 10 salads, they need to be suitably caught and retained and held there.

And it needs to work around the way the workflow goes in the kitchen, which is multitasking, short staff, and it needs to solve real problems. And the nice thing is you can solve different problems and make it work. I’ve heard people say that, well, the automation didn’t really save me any labor because I only had one person working there anyway. I still need one person working the automation, but the consistency means the cook goes well. The pizzas cook really well because they’re all consistent.

Food waste is another area where food waste is a huge problem, especially in the pizza category, but I think it’s also a problem in other categories as well. If you can eliminate food waste, just food waste alone can pay for the system. So I think if you’re an automation company or product developer, thinking about all the different ways you can add value, but it can only do that if it works with that particular operator.

So you’re going to find the customer who is doing something the way that your machine is designed to do it. If you can make 200 dishes an hour, that’s brilliant and that sounds really impressive, but how many restaurants are making 200 of the same thing every hour? Not that many. And so you may not really have a big market if that’s your claim to fame and that’s really the reason you want somebody to buy it and that’s how your economics work. If people are making 20 an hour, is it still economical? Does it still pay for itself?

Michael Wolf: You mentioned home and you’re seeing some things that are exciting you. And you don’t have to necessarily name names, but home has been really tough to crack for food robotics. And you’re seeing some interesting ones that broke over some of the barriers that were challenging in the past. What are you seeing there that’s exciting?

Clayton Wood: Home is tricky because it’s gotta be, it’s gotta be small. It’s gotta be versatile. Um, it can’t lock you into, you can only do, you can only use it if you buy our packet of pre -packaged food. Um, so I’ve seen one or two players in there who are, who are solving that, who are offering pre -packaged food or recipes, but you can also customize and add your own ingredients, but making a pretty versatile device. So I think that’s a category that has promise, but it’s especially tricky because even if you’ve got something that works brilliantly, you’ve got the whole, it’s a consumer market, and how do you break into consumer markets? You know, got to build a brand and get everybody’s attention. And that’s just, that’s a world that I’m less familiar with. And it’s a pretty daunting challenge to break into that consumer market.

Michael Wolf: All right, well, we’ll be talking about both the restaurant, robotic space, as well as the consumer space at the Smart Kitchen Summit. Lee Kindell will be there. Clayton, you’re going to be there as well, June 4th and 5th in Seattle. And I’m excited to see you there, man.

Clayton Wood: Looking forward to it.

You can hear Clayton at Smart Kitchen Summit on June 4-5th in Seattle. Get your ticket today!

Hostel Pizzas to Stadium Slices: The Remarkable Growth of MOTO’s Robot-Powered Artisanal Pizza

For most of the past couple of decades, Lee Kindell ran a backpackers hostel and boutique hotel in Seattle where he made pizza for travelers as a way to make them feel welcome and share stories over a good meal.

The pizza was so good that guests often told Kindell he should open his own restaurant. He thought it sounded like a good long-term plan but something he might do after he retired from the hotel business.

But then COVID hit.

“We lost our business, and I said, ‘You know, that retirement plan of making pizzas, we’re going to do it now.'”

Fast forward to today, and Kindell is running one of Seattle’s (and America’s) hottest restaurant concepts. In just two years, MOTO Pizza has expanded from one temporary location to three permanent ones with more on the way and a spot inside T-Mobile stadium where Kindell’s team serves up pizzas to hungry Mariner fans during every home game.

A Visit With Moto Pizza, One of America's Hottest New Restaurants.

If you want to get your hands on one of MOTO’s craft pizzas, you must arrive early (in other words, just after opening or, in the case of T-Mobile, the first couple of innings) and have a little luck. If you’re okay with waiting, you can add your name to the month-long waiting list MOTO announces on its website and socials every few weeks.

When asked if the waiting list is some marketing gimmick, Kindell says it was out of necessity.

“When we first opened, we had a four-hour wait,” Kindell told me. “Now we’ll do 250 pizzas a night at one location, and it’s all timed.”

MOTO’s POS system enables the scheduling of pizzas, but it’s far from the only use of technology Kindell has embraced as he’s looked for ways to scale his business.

“When I hurt my arm, I had to stop making dough by hand and use a mixer,” Kindell said. “When I started using a mixer, I realized the delta between making dough by hand and machine wasn’t that far apart.”

Kindell started looking for other ways to leverage technology. It wasn’t long before he heard of another Seattle company, Picnic, which makes pizza robots. Now, he uses the Picnic robot to add cheese, sauce, and toppings to hundreds of pizzas daily and is looking for more technology.

“Now, I’ve been reaching out to everybody, drone delivery, sidewalk delivery robots. Everything I can think of.”

According to Kindell, his use of technology has enabled his pizza to get into the hands of more customers. He’s also re-shaped his processes and pizza formats, when necessary, to reach more customers. For T-Mobile Park, where MOTO serves up a thousand pizzas or more per night, Kindell and his team created a new single-serve pizza size that fits in hand like a mobile phone.

“Think about how comfortable that phone is in your hand,” Kindell said, holding his phone. “I wanted a slice to be that comfortable in your hand.”

While much of Kindell’s early success is due to hard work and his embrace of new technology, he’d also be the first to tell you some of it – especially MOTO’s presence at a major league ballpark – has to do with luck.

When Kindell saw a couple of guys eating his pizza in the front yard in West Seattle, he asked how they liked it. After they told him it could survive in New York, he asked what they were doing out here, and they said they worked for the Seattle Mariners.

“I asked one of them, ‘How do I get into the stadium? Who do I talk to?’. He said, ‘me.'”

The long lines and fast growth have drawn lots of attention to MOTO, including from investors. But, while investors “are knocking down the door,” Kindell said he is not in any hurry as he figures out a way to use technology to optimize his processes even further to take his concept nationwide.

“I just want to be one step ahead with everything that I’m doing because when the time comes, I’m going to have my systems in place and ready to go so I can do it in stadiums all over. I can do it in the grocery store. And in urban and suburban spaces.”

Hopefully, by then, there won’t be a wait.

Food Tech News: Samsung Heads Into the Kitchen, Robot Meets Artisan Pizza

The Spoon is back for another week of food tech news, and this week Michael Wolf and Allen Weiner talk about what’s going on in the smart kitchen, alt protein, CRISPR and more.

Here are the stories we talk about:

  • Samsung and LG play nice in the kitchen, and Samsung launches food app. 
  • MOTO Pizza, where you wait a month for your pizza order, is crazy about Picnic’s pizza robot
  • Pairwise reups partnership with Bayer for CRISPR-based innovation
  • GFI says plant-based meat sales were up in 2022
  • DoorDash is bringing AI to their apps and call centers

As always, you can just hit play below to listen to the podcast, head to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or listen on your favorite podcast app.

As mentioned in the show, the Spoon is once again leading the charge for food tech at CES, the world’s biggest tech show. If you are interested in showcasing your future food or food tech innovation, head over to The Spoon’s CES page for more info.

Also, on October 25th, we’ll be bringing leaders at the intersection of food and AI together for a day of conversation. Please use the discount code PODCAST for 15% off tickets to the Food AI Summit.

Picnic CEO Departs Just Weeks After Pizza Robot Startup Has Significant Layoffs

Clayton Wood, the CEO of pizza robot maker Picnic, is departing the company, according to a post made by Wood on Linkedin.

Wood joined the company – originally named Otto Robotics and Vivid Robotics before it eventually settled on Picnic – in 2019 after it parted ways with its founding CEO, Garett Ochs. Since then, Wood has led Picnic through significant growth and a couple of funding rounds.

The Picnic CEO’s departure comes just weeks after Wood announced on Linkedin that the company was having its first layoffs. At the time, Wood said the company “had to make the difficult decision to reduce our company size and say goodbye to some colleagues” due to the “current economic environment.” Now Wood is saying goodbye to the company he led for over four years.

“After an amazing 4+ year ride, I’m stepping down as CEO at Picnic,” Wood wrote. “It’s been an exhilarating adventure, helping to build a new industry of restaurant automation, and I’m very proud of the work I was able to accomplish with the invaluable assistance of an amazing team of leaders and contributors.”

Wood said he does not know where he will end up next but plans to start looking for his next role after some time off. After laying off a big chunk of his team and facing the prospect of trying to raise more capital in the current VC winter, I can’t blame him for wanting to take a break.

So what does the future look like for Picnic and the broader food robotics space?

The near-term prospects for the company are tough, having to look for a new CEO and raise additional money. The company raised a $16.3 million Series A in 2021 and, according to a filing last year, was looking to raise an additional $7.75 million. Despite Wood’s success raising money previously, the company was undoubtedly having difficulty raising a significant Series B in the current funding climate. The company could now be a target for acquisition by a larger company such as Middleby, a food equipment conglomerate that has fueled much of its growth via acquisition. Middleby showed off its own pizza robot in 2020 but hasn’t talked much about it since.

As for the broader market implications, my guess is, unfortunately, we will continue to see some food robotics startups struggle over the next couple of years, given the slowdown in venture capital, particularly those looking to raise larger rounds for scaling. The pizza space is particularly competitive, and we’ve already seen some startups in the space go out of business.

We wish Clayton – who has been generous with his time for Spoon events and podcasts – good luck on his next adventure!

Food Tech Weekend Podcast: Talking Food Robots With Clayton Wood

Our guest this week on our weekly food tech news wrapup is Clayton Wood, the CEO of pizza robot startup Picnic. We talk about the latest food tech news and hear Clayton’s view on where things are going in the world of food robots.

Here are the stories we discuss on this week’s show:

We also put Clayton on the food robot hot seat, asking him:

  • How would you assess the food robot marketplace in 2022?
  • Will we see some consolidation in certain areas of food robotics in 2023?
  • Predictions for the 2023 food robot market.

You can listen to this week’s pod by clicking the player below, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Enjoy!

Picnic Partners With Modular Kitchen Manufacturer To Deliver Pizza Kitchen in a Box

Picnic Works, a Seattle-based maker of food-making robots, today announced a new partnership with ContekPro, a manufacturer of modular kitchens. Under the newly announced partnership, the two companies will deliver custom-built, pre-fabricated kitchens to quick service operators, hotel chains, or anyone else who wants a pizza robot restaurant in a box.

For those unfamiliar with Picnic’s newest partner, ContekPro builds modular kitchens for food service companies, including quick-serve restaurants, ghost kitchens, and resorts. The Portland-based company was founded in 2017 as a modular construction company and pivoted in 2019 to focus exclusively on modular kitchens after it found over half of its orders were for modular kitchens.

The deal marks the second partnership for Picnic over the last few months with a fellow Northwest startup. In August, the company announced an agreement with Minnow to offer its Pizza Station with the fellow Northwest startup’s pickup pods. The company has also been announcing a string of new trials with operators big and small for its pizza robot this year.

The combined solution from Picnic and ContekPro offers something of an answer to one of Picnic’s competitors, Hyper-Robotics, an Israel-based startup that builds shipping container food robots. Last year Hyper announced it had made a shipping container-based robot restaurant for Pizza Hut Israel (Hyper’s founder happens to be the master franchise owner for all of Pizza Hut Israel).

Whether it’s for a QSR building a small footprint drive-thru or a ghost kitchen operator expanding into new markets, modular kitchens make a lot of sense in many scenarios. For example, instead of finding land, breaking ground, and going through the often arduous process of zoning a new building, dropping a shipping container kitchen into a parking lot or some other easily accessible location can provide a much easier way to expand.

Typical ContekPro containers range anywhere from 320 square feet up to 960 square feet in size (according to ContekPro, the rendering in the announcement is 320 square feet). And while the announcement doesn’t describe the economics of a pizza-robot-in-a-box, ContekPro told The Spoon that operators can probably expect to pay from $240 thousand up to $400-$500 thousand or so for a restaurant container. As far as the cost of a Picnic, operators can expect to pay Picnic its typical robot-as-a-service monthly fees (which can range from $3,500 to $4,500 a month).

Picnic & Minnow Partner to Offer Automated Solutions For Food Service

Have you heard about Seattle’s latest supergroup?

No, I’m not talking Pearl Jam and Soundgarden, but a food automation startup collab of Picnic and Minnow.

Picnic, a company that makes automated pizza-making robots, and Minnow, a Seattle-based maker of food-pickup delivery pods, have announced a new partnership to offer customized solutions using the two companies’ technology, according to an announcement sent to The Spoon. The new collab will focus on creating customized solutions for a variety of different food concession scenarios and formats, including at theme parks, stadiums, or schools. The solutions will be tailored towards concepts utilizing mobile ordering and self-service pickup.

From the announcement:

A customer can place a mobile or kiosk order that is made automatically by the Picnic station and then put in a heated or insulated Pickup Pod for the customer to retrieve at their convenience. At universities, students can place mobile pizza orders which are assembled by the Picnic Pizza Station and then picked up from a Pickup Pod.

For Picnic, the deal is the latest in a string of different partnerships and collaborations that will potentially put its pizza assembly machine in new and interesting food service concepts. This year the company also partnered up with PizzaHQ, a New Jersey startup looking to create a chain of automation-powered pizza restaurants. They also are working with Speedy Eats, another startup creating standalone automation powered kitchens in the middle of empty parking lots.

Minnow has also been busy of late. The week the company announced a deal with real estate developer Westdale to put Minnow’s Pickup Pods in multifamily properties in Texas, Florida and Georgia. The winner of the Smart Kitchen Summit 2020 Startup Showcase has also been picking up small wins in places like NYC to San Diego.

A new location powered by a Picnic and Minnow solution could automate a large part of the food-making and the consumer-facing aspects of a pizza restaurant, something that could enable pizza restaurant operators to put lower-cost and small footprint concepts.

Picnic’s Pizza-Making Robot Heading To Five College Campuses This Fall

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.

Let’s Order a Pizza(bot)! Picnic Reveals Pricing, Opens Ordering For Pizza Robot

So you want to deploy a pizza robot? Seattle-based Picnic has you covered (as long as you can cover their monthly fees, that is).

And now we know what that pricing looks like because the pizza robot startup just opened up reservations for their pizza bot on their website.

Starting this week, operators who want to reserve a Picnic pizza robot can choose from two off-the-shelf configurations: “The Essential” or “The Works.” The Essential configuration is your basic pizza workhorse, a robot that can build up to 100 pies per hour with cheese, sauce, and fresh-sliced pepperoni. The Works configuration has additional toppings capability, allowing operators to add sausage, mushrooms, and onions – or whatever toppings they like – up to three total. An additional toppings module is available for The Works for an additional charge.

Both Picnic models can be configured to work with varying dough thickness (up to 2 inches max) and pizza sizes of 12″, 14″, and 16″. The operator can also customize the system to add ingredients in whatever order they prefer, and both models can be configured to have the conveyor system work left to right or right to left.

Those familiar with the Picnic robot know that the system is designed today for solely adding stuff on top of the pizza. Company CEO Clayton Wood has previously told The Spoon that while Picnic robots will someday have the capability to create the dough pies and cook the pizza, the initial focus is on the most “work-intensive” part of pizza-making: adding sauce, cheese, and toppings.

Like many food robotics startups, Picnic uses a robotics-as-a-service pricing model. Baseline pricing for the Essential configuration is $3500 a month for a three-year term, while the Works is $4500 a month for three years. Both models can be reserved with a $250 deposit.

If all that sounds good and you are looking to deploy a Picnic in your restaurant, you’d better hurry. According to Picnic, the systems are sold out for Q1 of next year, and there is extremely limited inventory left for Q2. However, things start to look better in the second half of next year, and both models are widely available for Q4.