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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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PizzaHQ’s Founders Are Building a Robot-Powered Pizza Chain of the Future

Darryl Dueltgen and Jason Udrija had a choice: Expand their successful New Jersey pizza restaurant brand called Pizza Love, or start a tech-powered pizza concept that could change the pizza industry.

They decided to start a revolution.

“We’ve put a lot of time into building a labor-reduced, tech-driven concept that we believe will revolutionize the pizza industry,” said Udrija, who cofounded PizzaHQ alongside partners Dueltgen and Matt Bassil.

According to Udrija, PizzaHQ will utilize robotics and other technology to create a more affordable pizza (“almost a 50% lower price point”) while using the same recipe and high-quality ingredients of the pies made at their dine-in restaurant.

“Our POS will directly inject the customer order into the Picnic system,” said Udrija. “The Picnic conveyer feeds straight into our ovens and then gets cut and boxed before pick up for delivery.”

Once the pizza is boxed, it’s loaded into delivery vans and distributed to heated pickup lockers around Totowa, New Jersey, a borough about thirty minutes north of Newark. Customers will be able to track their delivery and will scan a QR code to pick up the pizza waiting for them in a locker. Third party delivery partners like UberEats will also be able to pick up orders from the pickup lockers and deliver to customers.

To reach a wider swath of customers over time, Udrija and his cofounders plan to use a hub and spoke model that creates enough production volume to blanket a metro area with coverage for their pizza. Udrija says the company plans to surround the central production facility, or hub, with five fulfillment centers over the next five years. The raw ingredients for the pizzas will be prepared at the hub each day and delivered to the fulfillment centers. The plans is for the hub to grow up to four Picnic pizza robots and 50 employees, while each distribution center will have two Picnic pizza bots and about ten employees each.

Udrija says once they work out the kinks in their northern New Jersey system, they plan to replicate the model in other cities across the country. To fund their growth, the company has raised $1.3 million through private investors and a bank loan, and plan on closing out the first round of funding at $1.7 million in the next few months.

If PizzaHQ takes off, it would be a big win for Picnic. PizzaHQ’s entire system is built around Picnic pizza robots, so each city the company builds out at a similar scale to its northern New Jersey market would translate to more than a dozen Picnic pizza machines.

PizzaHQ’s rethink of the pizza restaurant is part of a broader trend in the restaurant industry to adapt to the rapid rise in digital ordering. In markets like China, hub and spoke production models optimized for delivery have grown rapidly in recent years. In the US, digital ordering and delivery have given rise to new operating models, including online-only restaurant concepts powered by ghost kitchens. With PizzaHQ, the company is combining the hub and spoke with the dark kitchen model along with a few extra toppings of automation and other technology on top.

It may be too soon to tell if PizzaHQ will revolutionize the industry, but the company has a few things working in its favor. For one, the pizza industry is massive and is already largely built around delivery. The founders also have experience building a pizza restaurant business, which gives them both an existing customer base to market into as well as a sense of legitimacy in an industry that is bloating up quickly with digital-only concepts.

For those who live in or around Totowa, New Jersey and want to try PizzaHQ out, the company expects to start service in the first quarter of 2022.

Picnic Announces Commercial Availability and Pricing of its Pizza Robot

Picnic announced today that its pizza-assembling robot is now commercially available for pre-orders and that its robot-as-a-service will cost between $3,500 and $5,000 per month, depending on factors such as menu and volume.

Picnic makes a modular system that uses computer vision and robotics to top pizza dough. Pizza crusts are placed on a conveyor belt, automatically stopping under dispensers to be topped accordingly with ingredients such as sauce, cheese, pepperoni and more. Because it is modular, more nodes can be added to add more toppings.

Obviously restaurant labor is a big issue driving much of the discussion around automation and robotics in food tech. Picnic CEO Clatyon Wood told me by video chat this week that while attracting and retaining labor is still a pain point for his customers, another reason for the move into automation is the digitization of ordering. Whether its online, mobile, or via in-house ordering via kiosk, digital experiences are driving more sales. “If you want to produce high volumes of food, automation is the answer,” Wood said. “Doing that with labor just isn’t an option these days.”

In addition to labor and volume, robot and automation can also provide a number of other benefits for restaurant. Robots consistently dispense the same amount of food every time, resulting in less waste and tighter control over ingredients. Robots can also operate dangerous machinery like a deep fryer or pizza oven without getting injured. And especially important in our ongoing pandemic, not only do robots not get sick, but they create more social distance for other human workers inside a kitchen.

All of these reasons help explain why we are starting to see more food-creation robots come to market. XRobotics and Middleby both make commercial pizza-assembling robots. Last week, Hyphen unveiled its Makeline automated food assembly system for fast casual restaurants like Sweetgreen. And while Miso Robotics’ Flippy is already working the fryer at White Castle, the company recently announced a new automated drink dispenser for QSR drive-thrus.

All of these solutions are still very early on, however, and we don’t yet know if the economics of robotics are truly sustainable. We’ll be seeing more public announcements of robot adoption from restaurant brands this year, so we can start to measure automation’s true efficacy.

For its part, Picnic will manufacture and install existing customer orders throughout the remainder of this year, and new orders will ship in 2022.

Pizza Robot Company Picnic Raises $16.3M Series A, Adds Strategic Partners

Picnic, which makes pizza assembly robots, announced today that is has raised a $16.3 million Series A round of funding. The new round was led by Thursday Ventures, with participation from existing investors Creative Ventures, Flying Fish Partners and Vulcan Capital (and includes the $3M bridge funding from October of last year). This brings the total amount of funding raised by Picnic to $34.2 million. At the same time, Picnic also announced new strategic partnerships with with food service industry company Orion Land Mark, Ethan Stowell Restaurants, National Service Cooperative and Baseline Hardware Financing.

Seattle, Washington-based Picnic makes modular pizza assembly robots capable of topping hundreds of pizzas an hour. These automated machines can be placed in a row, with each one dispensing their own ingredients. Pizza crusts are place on a conveyor belt, which runs under the dispensers which dish out the proper amounts of sauce, cheese and other toppings. Picnic announced its second generation robot in October of last year, which featured a switch to transparent walls and containers so operators could see in real time when toppings need to be refilled.

Interest in food robots and automation has accelerated thanks largely to the pandemic. Not only can robots work 24 hours a day and not call in sick, they also reduce human contact with food and create more social distancing in kitchens. But Clayton Wood, CEO of Picnic, told me by phone last week that the pandemic has ushered in entirely new thinking about foodservice. “What we really see as we come out of the pandemic is the foodserice industry has been reimagined,” Wood said. “It’s divorced the idea that the kitchen has to be attached to a dining room.”

As such, there are new opportunities for Picnic and other food automation companies where there are high volumes of takeout and delivery. Wood cited ghost kitchens and even grocers as two examples.

In addition to adapting to new post-COVID workplace realities, Wood is quick to point out that Picnic also helps food operators with ingredient cost. “There’s a lot of denial about food waste, even though the industry average is 10 percent,” Wood said. Robotic systems like Picnic’s can help lower waste and cost because they dispense the exact same amount of toppings every time without any overages.

Pizza is becoming a popular food for robotics. In addition to Picnic, xRobotics has its own take on automated pizza assembly, and Middleby launched its PizzaBot 5000 last year. In addition to pizza making robots, we’re also seeing a number of pizza vending machines come to market like Piestro, API Tech and Basil Street.

“It’s a sign of the industry maturing,” Wood said of all his competition. For its part, Picnic will use its new funding and partnerships to separate itself from the pizza pack. The company says it will use its new money to hire out its team and expand commercial operations, which will most likely be made easier by the company’s new strategic investors. Orion Land Mark is one of the biggest suppliers of pizza and pizza supplies to convenience stores around the world and Ethan Stowell Restaurants operates a number of eateries in the Seattle area.

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.

Picnic Debuts Its Second Generation Pizza Robot

Picnic, the Seattle based pizza robot company, unveiled their second generation pizza robot this week.

The new system, which you can see in action in the video below, is a fully customizable assembly line pizza topper machine that features four different modules: sauce, cheese, pepperoni and the “granular” module, which dispenses up to three pre-cut ingredients. Like the first generation Picnic robot, the system is focused on toppings and doesn’t include a pizza oven.

The system, which like the first gen robot utilizes a conveyor belt and automatic dispenser modules, has a few noticeable differences. The biggest difference visually is that each module now is visible behind a glass casing and you can see the cheese, sauce, pepperoni and other ingredients containers as they dispense ingredients. The ingredient containers are also easily removable for washing and the tops of the modules are also clear, giving the operator a clear view into the how much of each ingredient remains.

The whole assembly line is also behind the glass unlike the first-generation Picnic. Finally, there’s a big red emergency stop shut off button on the front of each module housing.

As with any new product, actually getting them into the hands of users provides lots of useful feedback. I imaging putting the first-gen Picnic into heavy use at the Smart Kitchen Summit 2019 (where it debuted), CES and at T-Mobile Park gave the designers lots of ideas for improvement.

The new robot comes on the heels of a recent fund raise by Picnic. The company had announced a $3 million round earlier this month which it indicated it would use towards hiring and new product development. The new raise and robot come amidst an increasingly hot market for robotic pizza assembly, as companies like Middleby jump in.

One of the features that Picnic emphasizes in their new video is the solution is highly sanitary and allows for pizza assembly with limited human contact. At Smart Kitchen Summit Virtual earlier this month, Picnic CEO Clayton Wood indicated that interest in their pizza robot has actually increased with the pandemic as restaurants have been disrupted and more operators are looking into how to reduce human contact with food.

You can watch the new Picnic pizzabot in action below.

Picnic Pizza System from Picnic on Vimeo.

Picnic Raises $3M for its Robot-Powered Pizza Assembly

Picnic, which makes a robotic system for assembling foods like pizza, has raised $3 million in funding. Geekwire was first to report the news, writing that “Vulcan Capital, Flying Fish Partners, Creative Ventures, Arnold Venture Group, and others put more money behind Picnic.” This brings the total amount raised by Picnic to $20.7 million.

Picnic’s robot, which was a hit when it debuted at our Smart Kitchen Summit last year, is a modular system that uses computer vision and conveyors to properly dispense ingredients (like pizza toppings). Though it is best known for its ability to assemble pizzas (it can put together 300 in an hour), it has broader applications and could be used to make burritos, subway-style sandwiches and more.

The global pandemic has put a spotlight on food robotics companies like Picnic because they reduce the amount of human-to-human contact when making food, and they also help create more social distance in the kitchen. It also doesn’t hurt that robots don’t get or call-in sick, and they can work around the clock without needing a break. Robots can also work at high volumes. One of Picnic’s first customers was Centerplate Pizza at T-Mobile park in Seattle, though stadiums are pretty much shut down right now.

There are actually a number of companies in the food robot space, angling to bring their automation to restaurant kitchens. Both PAZZI and Piestro are pizza robots. Miso Robotics, just announced the commercial availability of its Flippy ROAR robot. And Blendid’s robot kiosks whip up smoothies.

If you are interested in learning more about Picnic and the future of robots in restaurants, I’ll be hosting a panel with Picnic CEO, Clayton Wood, Dischcraft Robotics CEO, Linda Poulliot, and John Ha, Bear Robotics, next week at our virtual Smart Kitchen Summit. Get your ticket today!

Pizza Party! Picnic Raises $5M for its Food Robotics Platform

Picnic, the food robotics company best known for its automated pizza assembly line, announced today that it has raised $5 million. The funding is part of Picnic’s seed round and was led by Creative Ventures with participation from Flying Fish Partners and Vulcan Capital.

Picnic came out of stealth mode last month to reveal its assembly line style robot where a conveyor carries a crust under dispensers that apply sauce and other toppings. Picnic’s pizza ‘bot is already being used by Centerplate at Seattle’s T-Mobile arena. (Picnic also fed hungry attendees at our Smart Kitchen Summit in October, cranking out hundreds of (tasty) pizzas per hour.)

While its first use is putting together pizzas, Picnic is really creating more of a modular platform that could be used for a number of different types of food. Think assembling Subway style sandwiches, for example.

As I wrote of the time of its unveiling , Picnic sits squarely at the nexus of a number of different food tech trends. First, it’s part of a wave of food automation that is taking over some of the repetitive tasks of food creation and promising to help restaurants deal with high human turnover. Second, among its first venues is a stadium, since stadiums need to feed a lot of people quickly, they are becoming a hotbed when it comes to food innovation. Finally, Picnic says that its machine can help cut down on food waste by precisely applying the same amount of ingredients to each pizza, each time.

With its new funding, Picnic says it will continue product development, as well as ramp up marketing and staffing.

SKS 2019: In the Age of Automation and Delivery, What Does the Restaurant of the Future Look Like?

At SKS, we spend a lot of time talking about how technology is transforming the kitchen. But eating obviously goes far beyond the home — specifically into restaurants.

In this panel from SKS 2019 journalist Kristen Hawley spoke with Clayton Wood of Picnic (formerly Vivid Robotics), Derek Pietz of Sweetgreen, and Adam Brotman of Brightloom about how shifting consumer demands and technology is reinventing the restaurant as we know it.

If you work with restaurants, or even just eat out frequently, you should really watch the whole video below. But for all of your impatient folks out there, here are a few high-level takeaways from the conversation:

Restaurants are transforming at light speed
The biggest conclusion from the panel is that restaurants are not only undergoing a dramatic change, but it’s happening quickly. “There’s going to be more change in the restaurant industry in the next five years than there’s been in the past hundred,” said Pietz, pointing to delivery, robotics, digital ordering, and shifting consumer tastes as the main catalysts.

Our concept of ‘the restaurant’ will shift
New technology and menu preferences will not only change the ways that restaurants look (digital kiosks) and function (more delivery), but will also challenge our conception of what a restaurant is.

For example, is a robotic oven a restaurant? Clayton Wood of automated pizza company Picnic would say, absolutely. In fact, robotics can actually help reduce risk for restaurants and help them keep up with changing consumer trends, like the uptick delivery and takeaway.

Customer engagement is more critical than ever
Obviously restaurants have always had to focus on customer loyalty. But recently, with the rise of delivery and automation, restaurants — especially fast-casual ones — have to be more proactive about it than ever before.

Brightloom, which Brotman calls “the AWS or Shopify for restaurant tech,” builds white-label customer engagement platforms. They use data science to help restaurants draw in more diners, facilitate their purchasing experience, and incentivize them to keep coming back for more.

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That’s just scratching the surface of the knowledge these panelists served up onstage. Watch the video below to catch the whole conversation and keep your eyes peeled for more content from SKS 2019 coming soon!

SKS 2019: Reinventing the Restaurant

Vivid Robotics Changes Name to Picnic, Unveils Assembly Line Pizza Making Robot

Picnic, formerly Vivid Robotics (and before that, Otto Robotics), came out of stealth mode today and announced its first product, an assembly-line-style food production robotic platform that will initially focus on making pizzas.

Unlike the pizza robots used by Zume and PAZZI, the Picnic robot has no articulating arms, but is a series of modular, customizable food dispensers. With pizza, an empty crust (frozen or handmade) is loaded into the machine where computer vision determines what size it is. When an order comes in, the crust moves onto a conveyor system which dispenses the sauce, cheese and toppings as the crust passes underneath. Once topped, the pies are move by a human into a pizza oven (Picnic believes pizza ovens are already good and didn’t need to be roboticized).

Picnic is in the Robotics as a Service business. As such, the company doesn’t charge clients for the robot, but rather works with each of its clients to create a customized monthly fee based on how many modules are needed, usage, etc.

Picnic’s robot can make 180, 18-inch or 300, 12-inch pizzas per hour. Because it is modular, the number of ingredients can be added or customized by placing another dispenser module in the lineup. As part of today’s announcement, Picnic also revealed two of its first customers: Centerplate, an event hospitality company with more than 200 locations at sports and entertainment venues, and Zaucer pizza, a Washington state pizza company. Centerplate has been using the Picnic robot for pizzas at T-Mobile Park in Picnic’s hometown of Seattle.

I went to Picnic HQ to check out the robot last week, and CEO Clayton Wood explained that pizza is just one use case for its robot. Because of the linear, modular nature of the platform, it could be used for any assembly style eatery. Think: Subway style sandwiches or burritos, with the dispensers layering on customizable toppings.

With its release, Picnic is sitting at the nexus of a few trends happening in the food world right now. Obviously, Picnic is automating traditional, entry level human jobs, a big topic in the world of robotics. But Wood told me that the clients he is speaking with are looking to automation because they have a hard time filling those jobs. Even when they do, there is high-turnover, and each time a person quits (or just doesn’t show up), their replacement has to go through the whole (expensive) training process.

There is a broader economics discussion to be had about why that’s happening, but it echoes what we’ve heard from other restaurant owners, and is even borne out in the research. Industry estimates peg the turnover rate for restaurants as high as 150 percent. So even those human replacements are getting replacements.

But it’s not just that Picnic is automating food production, it’s also where that’s happening. By going into T-Mobile Park, Picnic is reinforcing the idea that if you want to see the future of food tech, go to your local stadium or arena. These high-traffic, high-volume locations are hotbeds for food innovation and automation. At Dodger Stadium you can have Flippy fry you up some chicken tenders, at Yankee Stadium you can use Postmates to order food and skip the line, and at Golden 1 Center arena in Sacramento, you can shop at Zippin’s cashierless checkout convenience store.

Picnic’s robot can also potentially help fight food waste. Because the process is automated, each pizza is topped with the same amount of ingredients each time, every time. The robotic delivery also reduces spillage and mismanagement. (So no extra cheese for you!)

Picnic will be cooking up pizzas at our upcoming Smart Kitchen Summit next week(!). As if you needed another reason to attend, but if a pizza making robot won’t draw you in, I don’t know what will.

Dutch Grocery Delivery Service Picnic Cuts out the Middleman and Possible Profits

All eyes are on Amsterdam-based grocery-delivery startup Picnic, fresh out of a 100 million euro ($123.5 million dollars) investment from a number of Dutch firms which will allow them to fund a national rollout of their service. The Hague, the third largest city in the Netherlands, will be the newest marquee name added to the company’s delivery footprint. Picnic symbolizes hope for clever newcomers to digital commerce who believe they can make inroads in a David vs. Goliath battle for home shoppers.

Picnic, which is free to customers, works directly with suppliers to deliver fresh goods to homes using energy-efficient, custom-designed electric vehicles made in France and Italy. The company’s strategic advantage is its mastery of logistics; rather than following the lead of most on-demand delivery services, Picnic follows set routes somewhat akin to milkmen of the ‘50s and ‘60s.

The company piloted its service one and a half years ago in Amersfoort where it grabbed a sizeable market share from existing competitors. Picnic then expanded to Leusden, Soest, Utrecht, Maarssen and Almere with a warehouse in Utrecht. Picnic now has 90 electric carts roaming the streets of The Netherlands and has garnered 30,000 customers.

Despite the large investment, Picnic’s future is under debate. In addition to its free delivery, the company offers low prices but is faced with the enormous resources available to competitor Albert Heijn.  Owned by parent company Ahold Delhaize, Heijn is the largest supermarket chain in The Netherlands with ah.nl as its digital grocery delivery/in-store pickup business. Ahold, which has more than 1,000 stores Heijn stores, and owns the majority of U.S. online grocery retailer Peapod, has yearly revenue of more than 38 billion euros. Beyond heavily financed rivals, many question Picnic’s business model of free delivery. This begs the question as to whether Picnic is aiming become a major player or sell its logistics “value chain” to a larger competitor with a pan-European customer base.

In a 2013 report on the future of grocery delivery in Europe, McKinsey and Company, the consulting firm predicted that the market for online grocery will play out differently in different countries based on geography, product margins and consumer interest. It cited pricing, selection and online experience (including issues about payment security) as obstacles that had to be overcome to win marketshare, either in individual countries or across the continent. The past four years have shown McKinsey to be right on the money with its analysis.

The U.K. represents a microcosm of the dynamics of the European grocery delivery market opportunity estimated by Euromonitor to be worth about 10 billion pounds—representing a major tipping point. As in the Netherlands, competitive forces pit local supermarket chains Tesco, Waitrose, Morrisons and Sainsbury against online-only retailer, Ocado. Sensing the U.K. market was ripe for its massive reach, Amazon began its Amazon Fresh service in mid-June 2016 to Central and East London. It is Amazon’s first grocery-delivery foray outside the U.S.

Amazon’s service is available only to Prime Members which costs 79 pounds per year. On top of that fee, after one free month, customers pay an additional seven pounds per month fee on top of their Prime membership.  For each delivery over 40 pounds (weight) there is no additional charge; for smaller ones there is another four pounds tacked on.

And then there’s Asda, a large British grocery chain that is a wholly owned subsidiary of Walmart. With stores primarily in the North of England, its grocery delivery service was not highly rated by shoppers in a 2015 survey. However, it does provide the U.S. retailing giant with a base to invest and expand at any point.