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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Picnic Works

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’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.