So what’s the deal with rocket scientists and pizza?
No, that’s not a Jerry Seinfeld punch-line setup, but an actual question I have after seeing Andrew Simmon’s recent post on Linkedin about the latest pizza robot he’s stumbled across. Simmons, who’s made a name for himself documenting his learnings as he tinkers with his restaurant chain tech stack, wrote about a new pizza robot named, well, PZZA.
According to Simmons, the PZZA robot, which automates saucing, adding cheese and toppings, and cooking the pizza, was designed by long-time aerospace engineer Omid Nakhjavani. Nakhjavani, who worked on NASA space travel projects for Boeing over a decade ago (and apparently still works for Boeing), has been perfecting his pizza robot for seven years and hopes to ship it later this year.
Readers of The Spoon might remember another pizza robot built by rocket scientist Benson Tsai. After building a combo pizza robot and food truck called Stellar Pizza, the former Space X engineer sold his company this March to Hanwha Foodtech. Hanwha Foodtech, a subsidiary of Korean conglomerate Hanwha, plans to launch a pizza chain built around Stellar’s technology in both the US and South Korea.
Before PZZA and Stellar, rocket scientist Anjan Contractor built a pizza 3D printing robot for NASA in the early aughts as part of a contract awarded to aerospace systems subcontractor SMRC. From there, Contractor went on to launch his own startup, BeeHex, focused on building robotic food printing systems.
That there seems to be a fairly robust rocket scientist to pizza robot founder career pipeline shouldn’t be all that surprising, in that a) the mechanical engineering discipline is foundational to both rocket and robot building, and b) engineers love pizza.
Nakhjavani’s engineering mindset influenced some of the design choices for the PZZA robot, including the shape of the pizzas. His robot makes rectangular and square pizzas, in part because—as Simmons recounts—”round pizzas are not efficient and waste things like boxes by being square.”
You can check out the video of the PZZA in action below and read more about its specs on its website.
