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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Piestro

Massimo de Marco on Why Piestro Decided to Build a Back-of-House Pizza Robot

This week, Piestro CEO Massimo de Marco announced on Linkedin that his company Piestro is building a back-of-house pizza robot for restaurants.

After seeing the news, I decided to catch up with de Marco to ask him why he decided to diversify his company’s product portfolio beyond the automated pizza vending machine that the company says has $580 million in preorders.

You can read the transcript of my interview with de Marco below.

You’re working on a back-of-house robot. What’s the thinking here?

As we started showing our original machine to some of the big pizza brands, they would say ‘this is great, but what about the back of the house?’ My response was, ‘funny you say that, come and let me show you some designs’. They thought a back-of-house machine makes tons of sense, because clearly labor is not coming back for them. They’re having massive issues with keeping their stores open.

Explain the product.

It’s about three feet wide by about 32 inches deep. And if fits into pretty much any kitchen space because it doesn’t protrude more than a prep table.

Think of a pizza store that has a 110-inch pizza table which acts as an assembly line with all the different ingredients. If you can take that space and make it smaller, say a 68-inch assembly line, for the rest of the ingredients, our machine will add tomato, cheese, and pepperoni. We are also working on an addition for a couple of the top other ingredients. From there, the pizza can be finished on the pizza table where an employee can add the oil, add garlic, etc and then put it into the oven.

So it works with a restaurant’s existing ovens?

Yes. Think about the big pizza companies that have these ovens that cost $55,000. They’re not going to remove those from their back of the house right? These restaurant operators’ big concern is how do they get people to assemble the pizza correctly without any waste and do it very, very quickly. With our new machine, they will be able to assemble a pizza next 45 seconds to a minute depending on how many ingredients. They can consistently get one pizza per minute coming through so that the employee can take it and put it in the oven cook.

What’s the production capacity in terms of ingredients?

We don’t have a set amount, because it’s in the back of the house. Even if you do you 40 To 50 pizzas, you can always refill the machine constantly. You already have a person there that’s finishing up the pizza and putting them into the oven, boxing them. It’s not something our Piestro vending machine. You don’t want to go back to refill the vending machine. That’s why the Piestro Maestro has 80 to 100 pizza capacity ingredients; with our back-of-house machine, 40 is plenty, depending on the ingredients. But regardless, you can make 60-plus pizzas with tomato sauce and cheese without having to refill it.

One of the messages you are pushing is that automating part of the pizza making leads to less waste. Is that resonating with potential customers?

We’ve had interesting conversations with some big brands. One founder of pizza restaurant company said to me, ‘if I can fix just the amount of cheese that we put on our pizza so that we’re not wasting it across my company, I can save at least $70 to $80,000 across the company in cheese alone.’

So that’ll pay for how many machines?

It’s gonna pay for at least a couple of machines. But again, I’m an operator, and I want to get these machines in the back of the house of these restaurants and get them going, and then they will pay us a SaaS fee at the end of the month. And we haven’t figured out what this is going to be, but clearly it’s going to be considerably less than the Piestro (Maestro). Once it’s all said and done, our Piestro automated machine is about three grand a month, and I want to say this is probably going to be two-thirds of that. Which again, is not something that we have defined yet.

When will I be able to see one of these in a restaurant?

We’re going to put it into the kitchen of a large brand around the beginning of October. But that’s the that’s the first machine, the prototype, that is going to be tested. It’s a pilot is not going into a public restaurant but in a test kitchen. Once we make them happy, then we know that we can mass produce the machines, but we want to make sure that if they have something to say about it, then they can give us all the feedback that they can give.

With the company adding a second product, I know you much of your fundraising through crowdfunding. Are you looking to raise money to kind of scale this?

Well, we are gonna close this current round fundraising. We’ll see how we do, but we are definitely planning on another fundraising coming up in the fall. It’s already been planned. But the beauty is that this product is not very different from our current technology. It’s the same as the dispensing we use at Piestro, so we don’t have to go out and reinvent the wheel.

Thank you for spending time with me.

Thank you.

The Week in Food Tech Funding: Perfect Day’s Big Raise & Gorillas Quits Monkeying Around

The week’s big news is a $350 million Series D raise by precision fermentation unicorn Perfect Day. There’s a whole lot packed into this announcement, so let’s get right to it:

First, the funding raises Perfect Day’s total to $750 million and sets the company on track for a possible IPO. The timing couldn’t be better, as tech startups continue to see rising valuations and the market is hungry for more food tech (see Oatly). And while Ginkgo Bioworks was the first company with significant precision fermentation (PF) capabilities to IPO, Perfect Day will be the first true future food PF pure-play to go public.

As part of the news, the company announced an expansion of its consumer products company, the Urgent Company (TUC). TUC, Perfect Day’s wholly-owned CPG company behind the Brave Robot ice cream brand, will add new “household staples” to its portfolio with Modern Kitchen, the second consumer brand under the TUC umbrella. Modern Kitchen’s first product will be dairy-free cream cheese, which the company will make with its animal-identical whey. As part of the announcement, TUC revealed Brave Robot is now in 5 thousand stores and that they’ve moved a million pints of ice cream.

Speaking of Brave Robot, it always struck me as a risky choice for a product name. Sure it stands out, but Brave Robot also doesn’t exactly make one think of tasty ice cream, which I think is the biggest challenge for a product that also wants to somehow communicate to the consumer it is made differently from traditional ice cream. With Modern Kitchen, I have to wonder if Perfect Day went purposefully conservative, choosing a brand this time around that doesn’t create extra work for itself.

Perfect Day also announced their third line of business (the other two being ingredient innovation and consumer products) in enterprise biology scale-up services. This move is a formalization of its enterprise biology efforts that started with the company’s 2020 acquisition of bioprocess scale-up facility SBF. With its new business line, Perfect Day hopes to help other food companies with technology transfer and scale-up consulting services.

“We first got into the ingredient business because food companies, big and small, were eager to work with the ingredients we had successfully scaled,” said Perumal Gandhi, Perfect Day co-founder, in the news release. “Today, something analogous is happening on the technology side. There are innovators all over the world with ideas and ambitions similar to our animal-free milk protein, but need help getting there. We’re standing up business models to be able to share our demonstrated capabilities in a way that maximizes upsides for all, yet ensures that Perfect Day remains at the forefront of our new industry.”

What struck me about the series of announcements is they illustrate how Perfect Day has matured in both its business and how it talks about itself. The addition of business services not only adds a new revenue line to the company, but it is a strategically savvy move that will set Perfect Day up with a pipeline of long-term IP licensing and ingredient supplier opportunities.

On the company messaging front, it wasn’t all that long ago that Perfect Day struggled to describe its technology and the animal-free dairy products that resulted from it. That’s changed, however, as this announcement brims with confidence. The company has clearly figured out how to communicate the benefits of its product while also giving just the right touch of details around the technology behind it all.

And now, the rest of this week’s funding news:

Cultured Meat

New Age Meats – $25 Million: California-based New Age Meats has raised a $25 million series A to help fund product development and ramp up production of its pork sausage products. Founded in 2018, the company hopes to bring its products to market next year as it uses the funds to double its workforce and build a first pilot production plant.

Ghost Kitchens/Virtual Restaurants

All Day Kitchens – $65 Million: Ghost kitchen startup All Day Kitchens announced this last week they’ve raised a $65 million series D to expand its distributed network of satellite kitchens. The company, which launched in 2018, focuses on helping small independent restaurants expand their reach via a unique model; Unlike traditional ghost kitchens with often treat restaurants like a landlord, All Day Kitchens helps to launch its new restaurant partners across its entire network of kitchens in a given metro area.

Plant-Based

Ripple – $60 Million: Pea-protein alt-dairy specialist Ripple has raised a $60 million Series E. Ripple, which basically is to pea milk what Oatly is to oat dairy products, has continued to grow its products ever since its 2015 debut and plans to use the funding to expand into even more new products and markets. While not all pea-protein products from Ripple have succeeded – see our review of the pretty-bad and now discontinued Ripple yogurt here – I’m intrigued to see what new products they bring to market (well, of course, except maybe yogurt).

Food Delivery

Avo – $45 Million: Israel-based food delivery startup has raised a $45 million Series B. Avo, which offers white-label food and consumer products delivery to landlords and employers, says it plans to use the funding to expand into 10 new metro markets over the next year. From the release: Avo’s mission is to deliver everything from groceries and alcohol to electronics and personal care items to millions of people daily. The company’s customizable amenity platform enables residential and commercial customers to obtain everyday items, the same day, without any minimum order size or incurring any delivery fees of any kind. The platform also excludes a tipping fee, as Avo has a full-time salaried team. Stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic, Avo is currently adding a new major market every month – a dramatic increase in growth that has helped drive revenue 1000% over the past two years.

HUNGRY – $21 Million: Chef-powered catering delivery company HUNGRY has raised a $21 million Series C from a mix of athletes, reality TV talent show singers, and the usual mix of corporate venture capital funds. The company, which lets companies cater food from chefs, works with a variety of high-profile chefs such as Tom Colicchi and has claimed it allows chefs to earn up to half a million per year on the HUNGRY platform.

Swiggy – Half a $Bil?: Indian food delivery startup Swiggy is reportedly in talks to raise a $500-$600 million funding round that would value the company at one Oatly ($10 billion). Invesco will likely lead, while others like Softbank will also throw in capital.

10 Minutes Grocery Delivery

Gorillas – $950 Million: Gorillas, the fast-growing, fast-grocery delivery business has raised an eye-popping $950 billion in funding. The news comes even as the company has reportedly decided to stop monkeying around with a US expansion, at least for the time being. According to Business Insider Germany, Gorillas has decided to scale back its US expansion plans outside of New York City and is laying off employees beyond the Big Apple. This funding comes in large part from Delivery Hero as Gorillas continues expansion in as Germany, the United Kingdom, Spain, and France.

Plant-Based Fish

Hooked – €3.8 Million: Sweden’s Hooked has raised €3.8 Million for its plant-based fish products. Like many new alt-protein funding rounds nowadays, Hooked’s with news of a celebrity backer, Swedish music star Danny Saucedo. The company launched its plant-based tuna brand Toonish into retail last month in the Swedish market.

Food Robots

Piestro – $4.7 Million: Piestro, a maker of robotic pizza-making kiosks, has raised just under $4.7 million via equity crowdfunding. The campaign, which the Wavemaker Labs portfolio company ran using StartEngine, will be used to fund the second-generation Piestro, which will be the first pizza robot from the company to be deployed in consumer-facing locations and take payments. The company hopes to have its new prototype deployed by December of this year. Wavemaker Labs, which describes itself as a “robotics and automation corporate innovation studio”, has shown a preference for using platforms such as StartEngine and SeedInvest to raise funds with its portfolio companies like Piestro, Miso Robotics, Future Acres and Bobacino.

Piestro Raises Nearly $5M in Equity Crowfunding to Fund Pizza Robot Development

On Thursday, Piestro, a maker of automated pizza-making vending machines, wrapped up a nearly $5M ($4,667,468 to be exact) equity crowdfunding campaign.

According to the funding prospectus for the just-completed campaign, the company plans to use the funds to develop its second-generation pizza robot. The second-generation Piestro, which will be the first pizza robot from the company to be deployed in consumer-facing locations and take payments, will use what the company describes as ‘cold-to-cook’ technology. The company hopes to have its new prototype deployed by December of this year.

While Piestro’s first-generation prototype has largely been completed, the company is iterating on the software and is working to add a conveyor belt system into the product which will enable it to cook a pizza in 3 minutes or less.

Piestro’s use of crowdfunding isn’t surprising given it’s a Wavemaker Labs portfolio company. Wavemaker Labs, which describes itself as a “robotics and automation corporate innovation studio”, has shown a preference for using platforms such as StartEngine and SeedInvest to raise funds with its portfolio companies like Piestro, Miso Robotics, Future Acres and Bobacino.

Piestro’s success with its crowdfunding campaign comes on the heels of the news about locking up a partner in 800 Degrees, a pizza chain that has plans to roll out 3,600 Piestro pizza vending machines over the next five years.

According to Piestro CEO Massimo Noja De Marco, the company has preorders for over 5 thousand Piestro machines. That disclosure came in an interview with Kevin O’Leary (aka Mr Wonderful), the Shark Tank investor who is a spokesperson for StartEngine.

During the same interview, O’Leary asked what it costs to make a Piestro. “Ultimately it’s probably gonna cost around $45 thousand and we’ll be selling at around $75 thousand, but we want to be able to use two different models,” said De Marco.

Piestro’s CEO explained the company will use both a robot-as-a-service and a direct purchase model. With the robots-as-a-service model, the customer pays a fee that includes the monthly lease, maintenance and support feeds, and a royalty for each pizza sold.

“It can be anywhere between $2,900 to $3,000 a month, but they have a machine that they can take to market without putting a lot of money down,” said De Marco.

For direct purchase models, which DeMarco said some large foodservice companies are interested in, Piestro will charge between $799 to $899 a month, which includes ongoing support and maintenance and a per-pizza royalty fee.

You can read more about the funding campaign in the prospectus and watch the interview with Mr. Wonderful below.

Meet the Innovators: Piestro

800 Degrees Teams Up With Reef, Plans to Open 500 Ghost Kitchens

Here’s some ghost kitchen new math for you: 800 degrees + 1 Reef = 500 ghost kitchens.

That’s at least according to Restaurant Business News, which is reporting the two companies have teamed up with plans to open 500 ghost kitchens. That’s a massive ghost kitchen land grab, of course, the kind that sounds good in a press release but will take huge amounts of capital to deploy.

Not that Reef has had problems raising capital. Last year, the company announced an eye-popping $700 million raise, in which it said it had plans to grow its ghost kitchen network. Still, a 500 ghost kitchens build-out for one restaurant chain will take hundreds of millions in capex, especially since the Reef model is to build dedicated kitchens to power new virtual restaurants. This model contrasts with the Virtual Dining Concepts or NextBite’s operating model which utilizes excess kitchen capacity in small restaurants or even chains to deploy new virtual brands.

Early Reef buildouts were in the company’s parking lots (Reef’s original business), but recently the company has gotten more creative, adding new kitchens in warehouses, retail stores and shipping containers.

The news isn’t 800 Degrees only push into the pizza business future. The company announced recently it’s teaming up with Piestro to deploy up to 3,600 automated pizza kiosks. All it has to do now is combine the robots with the dark kitchens a la PizzaHQ to create a fully robotic pizza chain.

800 Degrees and Piestro Partner to Create 3,600 Automated Pizza Kiosks

Piestro, which makes an robotic pizza kiosk, announced today that 800 Degrees Pizza will be using Piestro’s technology to offer a fully automated eating experience. According to the press announcement, the deal will have a projected order volume of 3,600 units that Piestro will produce and sell over the next five years.

Piestro’s machine is an automated pizza making kiosk. It holds the dough and dispenses sauce, cheese and a variety of toppings on demand to make a piping hot pie in three minutes. This is the first American restaurant brand partnership for Piestro.

Licensing out its technology is one of two go-to market strategies for Piestro, which will also own and operate a number of its own machines. Kiosks created for 800 Degrees will be labeled “800 Degrees by Piestro,” and will be placed in high-traffic areas such as airports, universities, hotels, etc. As part of the deal, 800 Degrees will have a number of machines that it operates to determine how customers are interacting with the kiosk. 800 Degrees Founder and Chef Anthony Carron told me by video chat this week that eventually the plan is to franchise out its machines to other owners.

Automated kiosks such as Piestro could have a lot of appeal for established restaurant brands looking to expand. With its small footprint, a kiosk can be installed just about anywhere there is power. This allows restaurants to put their brand in places without building out a full restaurant. Hotels, for example, could install an 800 Degrees pizza kiosk in the lobby to offer fresh hot pizza around the clock.

Carron said that this is his restaurant’s first foray into automation, driven mostly by two main factors. “Labor and consistency have been huge issues in our business,” Carron said. A robot like Piestro’s helps mitigate these issues as the robot can run all day without taking a break and makes the exact same pizza every time.

We are starting to more established brands partner with automated vending companies. Yo-Kai Express has already opened up its hot ramen vending machine platform to a number of well-known restaurants. And Chowbotics (part of DoorDash), which makes the Sally robot recently partnered with Kellogg’s to automate cereal and yogurt bowls for students at two different universities.

PMQ Pizza reported sales of pizza in the U.S. in 2020 topped $46 billion, which means there’s a huge opportunity for Piestro and other players in the automated pizza vending space. One big difference between Piestro and its competition right now is that Piestro makes its pizza on the spot. Other machines from API Tech, Basil Street and PizzaForno are storing and re-heating pre-made pizzas.

With the amount of money consumers spend on pizza, the ongoing labor issues and the pandemic still driving interest in contactless food retail experiences, we’re going to see a lot more pizza vending machines pop up, and a lot more co-branding announcements like the one from Piestro and 800 Degrees.

Piestro Adds Pay-With-Your Face Tech and Cubbies for Pickup

Robotic pizza vending startup Piestro announced today that it has partnered with PopID to integrate pay-with-your face technology into Piestro’s machines.

The integration of PopID’s technology will provide Piestro customers a new contactless ordering and payment system. In addition to paying with traditional credit/debit cards, users can create a PopID account to enable payment via facial recognition. Once that set up is complete, users can choose PopID as a payment method on Piestro’s app or on the machine itself. Orders placed ahead of time via the app can be retrieved via the same facial recognition. This pay-with-your-face option will be extended to Piestro’s white label, co-branded machines as well.

That ability to order ahead and pick up your pizza is also a new bit of functionality for the Piestro device. I spoke with Piestro CEO Massimo Noja De Marco by phone last week, who said that nine automat-style cubbies will be built into Piestro machines. This means you’ll be able to order your pizza ahead of time and have it held in a cubby that you unlock with your phone (or face).

That Piestro and PopID are working together isn’t that much of a surprise. PopID is part of the Cali Group of companies, which also includes Kitchen United, which De Marco founded and was Chief Concept Officer at. On a more existential level, in a post-COVID world, vending machine companies are looking to implement more contactless methods of interaction and reduce the number of physical touchpoints. As a result, other vending machine startups that may have been wary about facial recognition over privacy concerns could be more amenable to the technology now.

Piestro is certainly at the vanguard of a number of different technology trends. In addition to being a fully autonomous, robotic pizza restaurant and adopting a facial payment system, Piestro is also working with Kiwibot to allow delivery robots to pick up and deliver orders from its machine, and is embarking on its second round of equity crowdfunding.

We have to wait for all of this high-tech (and pizza) goodness, however. The first Piestros won’t roll out until early next year.

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.

Kiwibot will Pick up and Deliver Pizza from Piestro’s Robot Vending Machine

Human-free, contactless delivery is going next-level, thanks to a new partnership announced today between Piestro and Kiwibot.

In a word, this new deal is all about robots. Piestro makes a robot-powered pizza making vending machine , and Kiwibot makes little rover-style food delivery robots. As Piestros come to market, they will feature an integrated mechanism that allows Kiwibots to pluck those pizzas from the machine and cart them directly to your door.

The program isn’t live yet, and there isn’t a specific timetable for when it will happen. Piestro just successfully closed one equity crowdfunding campaign that raised more than $1 million, and is launching a new one with the hopes of raising $5 million more.

But when Piestros do come to market, those living in a Piestro/Kiwibot market will be able to order a pizza from the comfort of your couch through an app, and the Kiwibot will retrieve it and bring it to you. The exact process/app through which you order depends on if the Piestro is one owned and operated by the company, or if it is one that’s branded and licensed by a third-party.

Given the global pandemic, the desire for contactless food delivery is accelerating technologies that power both robotic vending machines and robot delivery services. Not only can robots work around the clock, they also remove a vector of human-to-human transmission. The Piestro/Kiwibot deal takes this concept even further by having a robot interact with the machine so there is no human in the transaction.

The ability to get items from vending machines was a feature that Kiwibot added last year, though being able to hold a boxed 12-inch pizza requires more space than picking up a Snickers bar. I spoke with Massimo de Marco, Piestro CEO by phone this week, who explained that Piestro is working with Kiwibot on a new version of its robot that can carry pizzas.

As noted, there wasn’t any indication of when or where Piestros will be hitting the streets. And even though Piestro and Kiwibot are the first to announce such a daisy chain of robot delivery, you can bet that similar deals will soon follow.

Piestro’s Playful Pizza Robot Gives Equity Crowdfunding a Spin

Automated vending machines were already hot coming into 2020. Companies like Briggo, Cafe X, Yo-Kai Express and Chowbotics were ushering in a new golden age of vending machines. With the COVID-19 pandemic forcing us to look at ways of reducing human-to-human contact when serving food, it looks like this golden age of automated vending is just getting started.

Throwing its hat into the ring is Piestro, a new robotic pizza making vending machine that just launched an equity crowdfunding campaign to get off the ground.

A portmanteau of pizza + maestro, Piestro is a colorful standalone automated kiosk. Inside, a robotic arm spins the dough under dispensers that pour sauce and apply cheese and other toppings. Then the pizza is run through a heater before being boxed up and popped out in 3 minutes. No word on the variety of pizzas (the video below shows pepperoni, peppers and mushrooms), but pizzas can be ordered via touchscreen on the machine or mobile app.

https://vimeo.com/425483855

Piestro is actually entering a market that is already pretty competitive. Basil Street recently raised $10 million for its pizza vending machine, API Tech has more than 200 pizza machines in operation in Europe, and earlier this year Le Bread Xpress launched the Bake Xpress, which makes pizzas. Additionally, there’s Picnic, though its robots only do pizza assembly (not cooking), and PAZZI’s robot pizza maker is more of a micro restaurant than a vending machine.

Of these, Piestro seems to be most like the API Tech in that it’s not re-heating frozen pizzas, but the machine has the assembly elements of Picnic and the theatrical flair of Cafe X.

Piestro is just in a prototype phase right now, so it’s not currently available on the market. It looks like Piestro launched its equity crowdfunding campaign on StartEngine over the weekend and has gone on to raise more than $82,000 dollars. And if we are reading the terms outlined on the campaign page correctly, Piestro is aiming to raise close to $1.07 million. We’ve reached out to Piestro to find out more details.

Another thing of note about Piestro is the team behind it. Piestro CEO Massimo De Marco was a co-founder of ghost kitchen company, Kitchen United. Piestro’s COO is Kevin Morris, who is also the CFO of Miso Robotics. Buck Jordan, CEO of Miso Robotics and partner at Wavemaker Labs, which made a lead investment in Piestro, is on the Board. FWIW, Miso is also running an equity crowdfunding campaign of its own.

I’m a big believer in the vending machine space, and I do think that the global pandemic will accelerate the trend. First and foremost, the food that vending machines create is higher quality than ever, and the cuisines served will continue to diversify. Second, the small physical footprint of vending machines means that they can be placed just about anywhere for convenient food on the go. And finally the humanless aspect could carry more importance as people are more concerned about who is touching their food.

From the campaign, Piestro has a dual go-to market approach. In Phase 1 it will be making its own pizzas and selling directly to consumers. In Phase 2 it will license out the technology to existing pizza companies. Though it doesn’t provide a ton of details, Piestro says that its machines can be up and running in two weeks for a cost of $50,000.

If Piestro’s crowdfunding campaign is successful, pizza and vending machines could be a hot combination to watch out for.