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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Let’s Order a Pizza(bot)! Picnic Reveals Pricing, Opens Ordering For Pizza Robot

So you want to deploy a pizza robot? Seattle-based Picnic has you covered (as long as you can cover their monthly fees, that is).

And now we know what that pricing looks like because the pizza robot startup just opened up reservations for their pizza bot on their website.

Starting this week, operators who want to reserve a Picnic pizza robot can choose from two off-the-shelf configurations: “The Essential” or “The Works.” The Essential configuration is your basic pizza workhorse, a robot that can build up to 100 pies per hour with cheese, sauce, and fresh-sliced pepperoni. The Works configuration has additional toppings capability, allowing operators to add sausage, mushrooms, and onions – or whatever toppings they like – up to three total. An additional toppings module is available for The Works for an additional charge.

Both Picnic models can be configured to work with varying dough thickness (up to 2 inches max) and pizza sizes of 12″, 14″, and 16″. The operator can also customize the system to add ingredients in whatever order they prefer, and both models can be configured to have the conveyor system work left to right or right to left.

Those familiar with the Picnic robot know that the system is designed today for solely adding stuff on top of the pizza. Company CEO Clayton Wood has previously told The Spoon that while Picnic robots will someday have the capability to create the dough pies and cook the pizza, the initial focus is on the most “work-intensive” part of pizza-making: adding sauce, cheese, and toppings.

Like many food robotics startups, Picnic uses a robotics-as-a-service pricing model. Baseline pricing for the Essential configuration is $3500 a month for a three-year term, while the Works is $4500 a month for three years. Both models can be reserved with a $250 deposit.

If all that sounds good and you are looking to deploy a Picnic in your restaurant, you’d better hurry. According to Picnic, the systems are sold out for Q1 of next year, and there is extremely limited inventory left for Q2. However, things start to look better in the second half of next year, and both models are widely available for Q4.

Hyper-Robotics Launches a Robotic Pizza Restaurant-in-a-Box

Hyper-Robotics (previously called Highpper), an Israel-based maker of fully autonomous robotic restaurants, has launched its first fully automated restaurant concept, a containerized robot pizza restaurant that can pump out up to 50 pies per hour.

The restaurant, which you can see in the video below, has a whole bunch of technology packed into one box, including three convection ovens, a conveyor belt system that moves pizzas into the ovens, an automatic slicer, and a boxing system that puts freshly-made pizzas into a box to hand off to the customer to name just a few.

Some other features of Hyper’s robot restaurant:

  • 30 pizza warming cabinets
  • Built-in cold storage that can store up to 240 kinds of dough in different sizes
  • Two robotic dispensing arms
  • Dispensers for up to 12 toppings

The company’s choice of pizza for its first autonomous restaurant isn’t a surprise given the company’s CEO and cofounder: Udi Shamai, the CEO of Pizza Hut Israel. Shamai is the master franchisee for the pizza chain in Israel and operates a total of 90 Pizza Huts across the country. Shamai is also the non-executive chairman of Dragontail Systems, a company that makes computer vision and AI systems to help automate food quality assessment for clients such as Domino’s.

With the launch of its robotic pizza restaurant, Hyper-Robotics joins an increasingly crowded pizza robot space that includes the likes of Picnic, Piestro, Basil Street, Bancroft, Middleby, and Pazzi to name just a few. While the unit is the first restaurant from the company, Hyper has plans for other autonomous robots that will also serve up bowl food, burgers and even ice cream.

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.

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.

Slice Launches Tiered Packaging for Its Pizza-Centric Tech Platform

Slice, a company fast becoming a go-to piece of restaurant tech for indie pizzerias, announced a new tiered packaging feature for its software offering. With it, pizzerias can choose which level of service they need from the software stack based on their individual business.  

The founders of Slice created the software platform as a way to give independent pizza restaurants some of the same digital tools and advantages the bigger chains — Domino’s, Papa John’s, etc. — can afford. The pandemic may have pushed the restaurant industry firmly over the threshold of the digital realm, but as was noted at The Spoon’s Restaurant Tech Summit this week, many mom-and-pop stores may not even have a POS system, let alone sophisticated online order and delivery tools.

Slice’s platform now offers such tools via three different levels of service. All levels give pizzerias a listing on the Slice app/marketplace as well as access to marketing tools. Slice Essentials adds access to a rewards program to that bundle.

Shop owners that need more digital capabilities can graduate to the Slice Premium level, which gives them access to online ordering, a customized website, and boosted search rankings on the marketplace. The top tier, Slice Complete, includes all of the above plus Slice’s POS system, which the company launched earlier this year. 

As Slice’s Chief Product Officer, Preethy Vaidyanathan, explained to The Spoon a while back, pizzerias have “specialized needs” when it comes to technology that might not exist elsewhere. Menus are one small example: pizza shops have to accommodate for things like different crust styles, and half-and-half toppings in their online ordering tools. Those capabilities are harder to develop in an interface that it might first seem.

Restaurants pay a fixed cost per order to use the Slice technology, as opposed to the percentage-per-transaction model used by most third-party delivery services. (Slice does not provide delivery drivers/couriers.) Consumers, meanwhile, use the app much as they wold any other restaurant-ordering interface. Slice is currently available in all 50 U.S. states at over 16,000 shops. 

The company raised $40 million in Series D funding this year, which it is using to expand its current line of products. 

Basil Street Using Equity Crowdfunding to Raise $20M for its Pizza Vending Machines

Pizza vending machine company Basil Street announced this week that it is raising its Regulation A+ round of financing through equity crowdfunding. The company is looking to raise $20 million on the SeedInvest platform, where reservations to invest in Basil St. are currently open.

Basil Street makes what it calls Automated Pizza Kitchens (APK), which are standalone vending machines that serve up hot pizza. The APKs are roughly 20 sq. ft. and hold 150 frozen 10-inch, thin-crust pizzas. When a customer places an order via the touchscreen or mobile app, the APK heats the pizza up using a non-microwave oven that cooks the pies in about three minutes.

That Basil Street is choosing the crowdfunding route isn’t too surprising since the company has yet to take traditional VC funding. According to the prospectus on SeedInvest, Basil Street raised $3.5 million in a convertible note in 2018, followed by three tranches of a Series A round from private investors between Feb. 2020 and Jan. 2021, totaling $8.99 million.

In a video chat this week, I asked Basil Street Chairman and CEO Deglin Kenealy why he’s turning to the crowd for funding instead hitting up VCs. “When you have someone come along and write a big check. It’s too far an advantage for the check writer,” he replied.

But Kenealy also echoed a more intangible sentiment that we hear from other startups like Piestro and Blendid about going the equity crowdfunding route. “We’ll get 7,000 or so investors. Those people will become cheerleaders,” he said, “I’ve got people who are invested in the business and helping us drive it forward.”

Like others in the vending machine space, Basil Street is looking to place its machines in high-traffic areas such as military bases, hospitals, universities, and factories. Basil Street has been running pilot programs and Kenealy said the company is signing deals right now that will put 50 machines in the field this Fall.

During its pilot program, Kenealy said that the company has learned a bunch of information from actual customer interaction. One thing the company learned in particular was about menus. Kenealy said that when the machine is placed in a closed location like a factory, where the same people use the machine every day, menu rotation and adding new items (like a breakfast pizza) is important. But when a machine is in an open location like an airport, where lots of people come and go, menu items can pretty much stay the same.

While Basil Street is turning to the crowd to finance its future, the market itself is getting crowded with competitors. There are a number of pizza vending machines already at market or on their way including API Tech, PizzaForno, Bake Xpress and Piestro. But, given how many locations just in the U.S. alone where a pizza vending machine could work, there’s actually room for plenty of players.

Any investment carries with it risk, but for those interested in plunking down money to own a piece of Basil Street’s pie business, the share price will be $2.82, and the minimum investment is $998.

GE Profile Debuts Range Oven With Connected Pizza Oven Built In

Last Fourth of July, my neighbor invited me over to show off his new outdoor portable pizza oven. I was both impressed and a little bit envious as he dished up scorching hot, leopard-spotted pies in just minutes.

It wasn’t long before I wondered how I could get my own pizza oven, only without going outside to cook. I could go the Breville counterop route, but I wanted something built-in so I could pretend I was like like our friends over at Modernist Cuisine.

Turns out unless I wanted to spend ten thousand bucks or more, there weren’t any options. Until now. That’s because GE Profile has debuted a new range that has an integrated pizza oven built into the combo appliance for $3,499 called the Trattoria Pizza Oven.

The oven, which features a full pizza oven inside a dual oven range appliance, was the brain child of long-time Louisville-based GE Appliances’ engineer Eric Johnson. Johnson had seen how GE Appliances had created a purpose-built high-temperature pizza oven for its high-end Monogram brand and wondered if a pizza oven could be built into a conventional oven. He created a prototype and showed it to leaders who liked what they saw. As a result, the product was the first to be commercialized through the GE Profile Innovation Studio, which the company launched in February of this year.

While the Monogram pizza oven is a high-tech wonder in itself in with its ability to cook pizza in just a couple minutes without any extra ventilation, Johnson had to work within the confines of what could be done within a more traditional range. While the new pizza oven uses traditional range heating elements (which reaches 550 degrees, compared to the 1300 degrees in the Monogram oven), it has some extra features built in to cook a nice pie including an aluminum alloy cooking surface that heats quickly and maintains temperature, a built-in precision surface temperature sensor to monitor and adjust temperature, and a broil amplifier to distribute heating throughout the cooking chamber.

GE Appliances positions the Profile Innovation studio as a place where new product concepts are launched with an eye towards early adopters. Unlike FirstBuild, which is also located in Louisville, the Profile Innovation Studio seems less about crowdsourced product prototype concepts and more focused on building new appliance concepts for GE Profile that could be commercialized fairly rapidly in fairly small production runs.

You can watch the hero reel intro for in GE Profile’s video below.

GE Profile Trattoria Pizza Oven

Editor note: This article originally had the new product as GE. It has been changed to reflect this new product is from GE Appliances and the company’s Profile brand.

Pazzi Opens Robotic Pizza Restaurant in Paris

Pazzi announced earlier this week that it has opened its first official robotic pizza restaurant in Beaubourg in Paris, France. This is the second robot pizza restaurant for the company, following a pilot facility it opened in a Parisian suburb in 2019.

Dubbed the “Pazziria,” the almost fully autonomous kiosk uses robotic arms to and other bits of automation to flatten dough, apply sauce and toppings, places pizzas in the oven and slice and box them up. The Pazzi robots are able to prepare a pizza in 45 seconds, can bake six pizzas at a time and produce 80 pizzas per hour.

The robots are fully enclosed behind a wall of glass and there are no humans helping out. Orders can be placed via web app or touchscreen kiosk at the restaurant. Customers can watch as the robots whirl about making each pizza, and can retrieve their order from a marked cubby.

There is a question with every food robot startup over whether to make their machines look more like “robots” by using articulating arms, or to make them more like industrial machines where the automation is more hidden away. Other players in the robot pizza space such as xRobotics, Middleby and Picnic are all definitely on the more industrial side. Their machines are meant to be tucked away in kitchens, cranking out pizzas and are not on display for customers.

Pazzi is going a different direction than those other companies and leaning into the theatricality of its robots. Like the Creator restaurant (RIP), Pazzi places its robots front and center and fully visible to customers and passers by. The homepage of Pazzi’s website is even splashed with “Come for the show, stay for the pizza.”

There’s actually never been a better time for Pazzi to launch its robo-restaurant. The pandemic, which is still very much a part of our lives around the world, has restauranteurs and customers looking for more contactless ways of food prep and delivery. Since Pazzi uses robots, there is not human-to-human contact making and selling pizzas. Pazzi’s robots can also run continuously without taking a break. (They are monitored remotely should anything break down.) Pazzi’s robots also means that it doesn’t have to hire, train and pay human workers, which is good for Pazzi’s bottom line. That, however, also means there are fewer jobs, creating complex socio-economic quandaries that still need to be worked out.

With two sites now up and running in France, Pazzi is eyeing international expansion and says it will be opening a location in Switzerland (perhaps next to a Smyze drinks station?). For those in Paris looking wanting to try out this robo-pizza, Pazziria Beaubourg is located at 42 Rue Rambuteau, and is open seven days a week from 11 a.m. to midnight.

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.

Domino’s and Nuro Begin Autonomous Pizza Delivery in Texas

Domino’s today announced the launch of its autonomous pizza delivery service done in partnership with self-driving delivery company Nuro. Starting this week, customers of the Woodland Heights Domino’s location in Houston, Texas can opt to have their pizza delivered by Nuro’s R2 robot.

The R2 is a low-speed, pod-like vehicle that’s about half the size of a regular car and completely autonomous. (There isn’t even room for a human being to sit in the vehicle.) Nuro got Federal permission in February of 2020 to start driving the R2 on public roads. In April of 2020, the state of California also gave Nuro the thumbs up to drive on its public roads.

For the Domino’s partnership, customers that order from the participating location via Domino’s digital properties can opt to get their order delivered by R2. As the vehicle makes its way along the route, customers receive alerts via texts. Once the ‘bot arrives, customers use a unique PIN to open R2’s doors and grab their order. 

Autonomous delivery is currently only available on certain days and at certain times at the Woodland Heights location. Today’s press announcement did not mention if or when the pilot would expand to other Domino’s locations.

Domino’s and Nuro first started testing autonomous delivery in Houston back in 2019. The pandemic has since increased the need for more contactless forms of food delivery, making autonomous delivery vehicles an attractive option. Underscoring this, Nuro raised $500 million in November of last year. To date, the company has made deliveries for Kroger, CVS, and Walmart, in addition to Domino’s.

Domino’s, of course, is no stranger to bringing tech into the restaurant delivery process — something it was doing long before the existence of third-party delivery. The company said in today’s press release that the Houston program will help them better understand autonomous delivery’s impact on both operations at Domino’s and customer relationships. 

If you are interested in the future of self-driving delivery vehicles, be sure to attend ArticulATE, our virtual food automation and robotics summit happening on May 18!