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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Piestro

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.

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.