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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Stellar Pizza

Meet PZZA, the Latest Pizza Robot Built by a Rocket Scientist

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.

After Years of Building His Robot, Stellar Pizza Founder is Having Fun Dishing Pies to USC Students

Back in 2019, Benson Tsai decided to attend a food robotics conference. The engineer had spent the last five years working for Elon Musk’s company SpaceX, applying what he had learned about battery technology as a member of the technical staff for electric vehicle startup Lucid Motors to space travel, but now he had a vague idea of launching a new startup that builds food robots.

At the conference, he watched a panel on investing in robotics that featured venture investor Avidan Ross, the founding partner at Root Ventures. The two struck up a conversation and hit it off, and those early conversations led to Ross becoming Tsai’s first investor.

In those early days, Tsai thought maybe he’d build an Asian food robot, mostly because he loved Asian food. Eventually, though, he’d settle on another type of food: Pizza.

“I ended up looking at what made sense to automate,” Tsai told The Spoon in an interview this week.

Benson Tsai

Tsai got to work on his robot, hiring about 30 or so SpaceX engineers in the process. He’d also raise lots more money beyond the initial $9 million investment led by Ross’s Root Ventures, the most recent being a $16.5 million funding round led by Jay-Z’s Marcy Ventures.

Four years and over $25 million in investment later, Stellar Pizza‘s food robot is ready for action and, over the past few weeks, has been serving pizza on the campus of USC. The robot heads to campus in a sprinter van, where students order pizza using the Stellar Pizza app.

I asked Tsai if he’s serving food from his robotic mobile food truck, and he answered yes, he wouldn’t have it any other way.

“I really enjoy going out in the field,” said Tsai. “I spent a lot of time working on the crazy robots, and now I get to see people bite into the pizza, and it’s really fulfilling.”

Tsai says so far, things are going pretty well. The Stellar Pizza van rolls onto campus five days a week, and already he’s seeing lots of return customers.

“We’re at 45-50% return customers,” said Tsai.

I asked him what the long-term vision is for the company and if he plans to license the technology to some of the bigger pizza chains. He told me that may be in the cards in the future, but for now, he’s happy building an end-to-end robotic pizza company.

“Nothing is off the table, but right now, we’re chasing the vision of Stellar Pizza, specifically just selling pizzas because, for one thing, building hardware that can make 100 different pizza recipes is actually quite hard. So we’re dogfooding and building our own brand, and if that’s successful, maybe we’ll chase that.”

Tsai and his company have come a long way from those early days when he first attended that conference back in 2019; Stellar’s first product is in the field and happy customers coming back for more.

Oh, and that first conference? It was The Spoon’s Articulate, the first-ever food robotics conference.

If you’d like to hear Tsai tell the story of building his pizza robot, sign up for The Spoon’s next food robotics event, the Food Robotics 2023 Outlook, a virtual conference taking place next Wednesday.

From SpaceX to Pizza Robots on Wheels: The Story of Stellar Pizza

In 2019, Benson Tsai left his job building rockets for SpaceX to start a company building a different type of technology-powered vehicle: a truck with a pizza robot inside that cooks and delivers finished pies to customers.

“My parents were immigrants from Taiwan, and they opened a restaurant when they first moved to the U.S., selling fish and chips of all things,” Tsai told The Spoon in a recent interview. “But food has always been central to my life, and it’s been my one real passion.”

While he was at SpaceX, Tsai would go off campus during lunch with his coworkers to explore neighborhood restaurants. Before that, he started his own electric truck company, his first venture-backed startup. With his latest startup, Stellar Pizza, he can finally combine his love for food and expertise in engineering.

According to Tsai, the main problem that Stellar Pizza solves is the rising food costs in the United States. The USDA found that the restaurant purchases consumer price index, a measure of inflation, rose 0.7 percent in January 2022 and was 6.4 percent higher than in January 2021. There was more inflation for grocery and supermarket store purchases with the consumer price index for those purchases increasing 1.2% in January 2022 and being 7.4% higher in January 2021. 

Stellar Pizza hopes to address this problem directly by selling to its target customer: people who want food quickly and conveniently. With this comes the challenges of refining the recipe to something that customers will love, particularly working with the dough, and developing systems that can accommodate all the different pizza inputs. The culinary challenges are accompanied by the challenges of the approach they are taking by operating as a company that is building new technology and a restaurant brand simultaneously. 

“The development of food robotics as compared to developing space technology is a whole different ball game, it’s lower stakes,” Tsai said.  

Stellar Pizza’s solution is to build serially by first developing the technology and then the restaurant brand. The reason why Stellar Pizza chose to operate its own restaurant brand is to stay vertically integrated and customize the technology to fit its needs. 

“If you look at SpaceX, raw metals show up at the door of the factory, and they sell rides to space, not rockets or any of the technology.” 

Another aspect of operating a restaurant brand is consumer perception. Consumer response to automation in the restaurant industry has, in general, been mixed, with some praising it for making food cheaper and more available while others worried that it will take away jobs. 

“All of the fast food in the world is already made by robots,” Tsai said. “Like the sausage patty you get in your burger is made by a factory somewhere so automation in food has already been a part of our lives for decades. We’re just moving the robotics a little closer to the customer.”

The long-term vision for Stellar Pizza is to move the pizza production closer to the customer by having just one person, a driver, who hands off the pizza to the customer or another delivery driver. This application is a hub and spoke model with the main truck and a fleet of delivery drivers making deliveries. Last-mile delivery has been a huge area of innovation since the start of the pandemic, especially automated delivery. McKinsey found that of the $11.1 billion raised by last-mile delivery startups, $9.9 billion went to startups with unconventional technology such as drones and autonomous vehicles. 

Stellar Pizza isn’t the first company to combine robotics and truck delivery in one startup. Zume Pizza developed a cobot method where a robotic assembly line spread dough balls and sauce before human employees added toppings. Another robot transferred the pizza into a double-decker oven where it was par-baked and then transferred onto a rack. From there, humans loaded the pizzas onto the delivery trucks, where the pies were baked while in transit to the customer. 

Zume raised $375 million in funding from SoftBank in late 2018 before it had to fold its pizza delivery operation. Stellar Pizza is different in that the robots are directly on the delivery truck. Stellar Pizza has already raised $9 million from three firms: Root Ventures, Collaborative Fund, and Crosslink Capital. It plans to launch this summer in Los Angeles, California.