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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

pizza robot

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.

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.

xRobotics’ Pizza Assembling Robot Concludes Test with Dodo Pizza

Pizza, of all things, is often at the center of advancements in food technology. You’ll find pizza at the forefront of innovation in restaurant software, autonomous delivery, NFTs, and of course, robotics. There are already a number of automated pizza making machines on the market, and jumping into that fray is xRobotics, which announced this week that it recently finished a test of its prototype at Dodo Pizza in Oxford, Mississippi.

The xPizza One robot is a self-contained, pizza assembling kiosk, which means it doesn’t cook the pizzas or stretch the dough, but instead just automates the topping process. Empty crusts are placed on squat, puck-like robots that scoot under the assembly system. As the robot moves under the machine, canisters of toppings such as sauce, cheese, pepperoni and are dispensed on top of the pizza based on the instructions given. The crust is spun as toppings drop to ensure even distribution. Once the pizza is assembled as ordered, the puck reappears where a person places the pie in an oven to be heated.

xRobotics (xPizza One) - a pizza-making robot

According to press materials sent to The Spoon, the xPizza One used in the Oxford pilot was set up to hold 11 types of toppings, which covered 90 percent of Dodo’s menu. The robot’s average productivity hit 100 pizzas per hour and over the course of the month, successfully made 472 pizzas, saving 32 hours of manual work.

Automated pizza assembly is becoming its own bustling sub-sector in the pizza world. Other players in the space include Picnic, which uses a more modular, conveyor belt-style assembly system, and Middleby, which makes the PizzaBot 5000 pizza assembler.

The pitch with all of these robot pizza players is the same: cost savings. These robots are literal machines that crank out hundreds of pizzas without taking a break. By having a robot take over the topping process, human labor can be moved to other higher-value tasks such as customer service and order expediting. In addition to potential labor savings, robots can also keep ingredient costs down because they distribute a precise, consistent amount of toppings. It’s never too much and there is no loss due to sloppiness or human error.

With this initial test completed, xRobotics is looking ahead. The company says it has 800 pre-orders from different pizza chains and operators and is prepping facilities to start mass production of the xPizza One in late 2021 or early 2022.

Bancroft Automated Restaurant Services Plots Pizza Robot for Parking Lots

Parking lots are typically associated with, well parking your car, or maybe doing donuts if you’re feeling rebellious. But parking lots may soon be home to an entirely new phenomenon — pizza robots — if Bancroft Automated Restaurant Services (BARS) has its way.

BARS has developed an all-in-one pizza robot that is larger than a vending machine or kiosk, and meant to be installed in big open areas like parks, sporting events or big parking lots.

The BARS Automated Pizza Kitchen stores 96 pre-topped, par-baked pizzas, each held in a takeout tray in a humidity controlled fridge. When an order is placed either by phone or via on-board touchscreen, the automated system plucks the pizza out of the fridge, runs it under a heater to finish cooking the pizza, and secures a takeout lid on top. From there it is stored in a heated cabinet. When the user enters their pickup code, the machine grabs their pizza from the heater and dispenses it to the user. The whole process takes under three minutes. You can see a video of it in action here.

Speed Bancroft, Founder and CEO of BARS, told me via video chat last week that his pizza kitchen can be integrated with third-party delivery services (so drivers can pick up orders), and can be configured either for walk-up or drive-through customers.

The robot makes 35 twelve-inch pizzas in an hour and requires a human to re-stock and clean the machine once a day. BARS is selling its Automated Pizza Kitchen for $80,000 with a $1,000/month subscription to run it. Though the BARS pizza system is meant to be licensed out to other restaurants, the first implementations will be through BARS’ own Speedy Fresh Pizza brand, with the first installation going in in the Tigerland area of Baton Rouge, Lousiana in about six months.

Pizza is a popular option for automation companies, as a number of players are coming to market in a variety of form factors. There are vending machines like Basil Street (which makes an “Automated Pizza Kitchen” of their own) and Piestro. There are standalone kiosks like PAZZI‘s. And on the larger end is Hyper, which is making fully automated pizza restaurants in a shipping container.

The good news for all these companies is that pizza doesn’t have to be a zero sum game. Pizza is a popular food and there are plenty of places big and small to build these micro-pizzerias. And if you’re going to pick up one from a BARS robot, at least you know there will be plenty of parking.

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.

Will You Try Pizzametry’s Pizza Vending Machine?

Let’s start with the obvious question you probably have after reading this story’s headline. Is it pronounced:

Peet-ZAH-metry, like Geometry?

or

PEETZA-me-try, like Cookie Monster would say it if he switched his favorite food?

The answer, according to Jim Benjamin, President of APM Partners, the company that makes Pizzametry is… both. It doesn’t matter how you slice the name; the Pizzametry is a vending machine will bake up a hot, fresh personal pizza any time of day or night.

“It’s for the consumer that’s looking for a meal replacement,” Benjamin told me by phone, “And needs more than just a bag of potato chips or a muffin.”

The Pizzametry is the size of a beefy vending machine. For around $5 – $6 (prices will vary depending on location), you can order either an eight-inch cheese (no sauce), or cheese (with sauce) or pepperoni pizza. The machine is pre-loaded with canisters of frozen dough which are then thawed, cut, pressed, topped and cooked at 700 degrees to make a pizza in three and a half minutes (that time actually goes down to 90 seconds on subsequent pizzas if you order more than one).

The Pizzametry, like so many automated food vendors, is meant for high-traffic areas like airports (which are starting to fill up with robots) or dorms or anywhere people want to grab a very quick bite to eat. Each machine can make 150 pizzas and accepts credit cards, bills and online payment services like PayPal and Apple Pay. The Pizzametry is also internet connected for self-diagnosis and can alert the homebase should any maintenance be needed.

Based in Rochester, NY, APM Partners is bootstrapped and has three employees. The Pizzametry has gone through field tests at the University of Rochester and the company is now taking orders and looking to deploy on a wider scale over the next six months. APM plans to own and operate the Pizzametries at first, handling all the stocking and cleaning of each machine.

In addition to straight sales, APM also has the ability to license out what is effectively ad space on the front of each Pizzametry. In Rochester, for instance, the company partnered with local pizzeria Salvatore’s, using their sauce on the pies. The effect, Benjamin said, is giving Pizzametry a recognizable neighborhood brand in each location.

Pizzametry is actually coming along at a good time to ride a wave of automation that’s sweeping the food industry. From fully autonomous restaurants like Spyce, to co-botics fast food from Flippy at Caliburger, to the smoothie making Blendid, to the salad dispensing Sally — food robots are becoming de rigueur.

I can’t speak to the quality of Pizzametry’s pizza, but if you think about hungry college students staying up late to study or a harried family needing just a quick bite before embarking on a plane, Pizzametry makes sense.

Now people just need to make sense of its name.