
Pizza robot makes 300 pizzas per hour - starpilot
https://www.geekwire.com/2019/secretive-seattle-startup-picnic-unveils-pizza-making-robot-heres-delivers-300-pies-hour/
======
wonderwonder
While this iteration of the product seems like it is not ready for prime time,
a couple more years of improvements and you could have a machine able to
reliably do the work of 2- 3 employees. There are many other industries where
the current version of automation is clumsy such as in trucking or fast food
but could look completely different in 5 years.

We are rapidly approaching a future where the entry level jobs like fast food
/ picking crops / warehouses can be automated away and even well paying ones
such as truck driving / taxis could disappear or scale down drastically. We
really should be having an urgent conversation on how to handle this and what
the responsibility of those that own the means of production will be (if any)
when this occurs.

Yang is obviously speaking about this and suggesting a BI as a band-aid /
solution but I do think this should be getting a lot more attention that it
is.

~~~
abfan1127
you do know we've been replacing humans with machines since the Industrial
revolution, right? These people that were replaced didn't just go off and die.
They found other more advanced work, allowing our civilization to produce more
wealth allowing all of us to be richer. The same will continue.

~~~
groby_b
Except good chunks _did_ go off and die because they couldn't adapt, or
because they were easy to exploit. (E.g. child workers). Or lived in subpar
housing due to urbanization, which made perfect breeding grounds for typhoid,
cholera and assorted fun.

You can't just handwave those changes away by saying "ultimately, they found
other jobs". They didn't. There were entire generations that suffered. At
_some_ point there was an equilibrium, but it was far from instant, and
"advanced" work doesn't help the person displaced.

~~~
Guthur
How did you come to the conclusion that children died out...

The role disappear children instead stayed children for longer and continued
education.

~~~
groby_b
They didn't die out, but they died in much larger numbers, because the
industrial revolution lead to an exploitation of child labor. Combined with
non-existent protections, a lot of them _did_ die on the job.

Children started to be children for longer because labor unions helped end the
practice. That was a good chunk of time after those jobs changed, and it
wouldn't have happened without active pushback. (The AFL pushed for an end for
child labor under 14 in 1881, and it took until 1938 to get the Fair Labor
Standards Act)

The idea that paradigm-shifting transitions somehow don't affect anybody
because "there will be new jobs" shows a stunning unawareness of historical
precedent, or how capitalism in general works.

~~~
perl4ever
"because the industrial revolution lead to an exploitation of child labor"

I'm skeptical of the idea that before factories, farms didn't use child labor.
Isn't the practice of closing school during the summer kind of suggestive?

Anyway, you seem to be arguing the opposite of the previous post, that there
were more jobs and this was bad. I thought the issue was there were fewer jobs
and that was bad.

~~~
glennpratt
> Isn't the practice of closing school during the summer kind of suggestive?

I don't think that's the case since education wasn't a given for the poor.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=why+does+school+close+for+su...](https://www.google.com/search?q=why+does+school+close+for+summer)

~~~
perl4ever
What does "education wasn't a given for the poor" mean? That's such a vague
statement I don't see how you can link it to anything. Education can mean
grammar school, high school, college...people in the past, who were farmers,
were generally poorer and less educated. However, less educated doesn't mean
no education. My grandfather was a farmer in the 19th (and early 20th)
century, and no, he didn't have a college degree, but that doesn't mean he
never went to school or was illiterate.

Linking to a google query like that is a step below even Wikipedia. If you
have a source you consider authoritative, why don't you provide that. I'm not
going to read the clickbait garbage in those hits.

~~~
glennpratt
"Journal of Inquiry & Action in Education, 5(1), 2012" was a top link for me,
apologies for not picking that, but I figured Google has something for every
bias.

[https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1134242.pdf](https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1134242.pdf)

There are a variety of factors, but farm work didn't appear to be it,
especially given that summer probably isn't the biggest time crunch.

I descend from Arkansas farmers, not at all suggesting they were illiterate;
more that they weren't in the driver's seat on the issue.

------
lkrubner
Back in the 1930s there was pancake-making-robot outside the diner across the
street from the apartment where my dad grew up on 72nd St in Manhattan. My dad
loved to watch the thing work. He'd put in a penny and a mechanical arm would
come out and pour some batter on a hot grill, then a few moments later another
arm came out and flipped the pancake, then a few moments later an arm would
come out and move the pancake to a paper plate, which then got shunted out to
my dad. Sometimes my dad would put in a penny when he wasn't even hungry, he
just loved the elegance of watching the robot move.

I often wonder why there are no such robots in Manhattan now? I have to assume
this is simply a matter of fashion. Robots seemed very futuristic in the
1930s, and even something as simple as a pancake making robot helped a little
boy feel in touch with the future.

~~~
umvi
Not saying this is the reason NYC doesn't have pancake robots anymore, but it
seems like New York in general has banned certain types of automation in order
to preserve jobs. For example, that's why you still see - in 2019 - manual
toll booth workers sitting in glass boxes in NY instead of automated tolls
like every other state has.

~~~
warent
Something about that seems wrong. I definitely respect the fact that someone
will do the job, but isn't that basically the equivalent of a universal basic
income except you're forcing the person to waste half their day doing trivial
work?

(FWIW I support a UBI)

~~~
JackFr
It's worse than that -- you're making them suck exhaust fumes all day.

~~~
hanniabu
Plot twist, their real job is to be a human air filter /s

------
nkoren
Nit: unless the video is running at a reduced speed, the claim is false. You
can clearly see that the pizza takes 18 seconds to pass over a single
location. If you were to run then pizzas through edge-to-edge, then the
fastest production rate would be (3,600 seconds per hour) / 18 seconds = 200
pizzas per hour. But that would risk having the dough from one pizza get stuck
to the dough of the next. Adding a sensible 2 second gap between each pizza
would reduce the throughput to 150 pizzas per hour.

Also, that sauce depositing methodology is just not right. This robot does it
much better: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=11&v=cc-
ClpymK_Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=11&v=cc-ClpymK_Q)

~~~
onlyrealcuzzo
It's kind of a ridiculous metric anyway. There's probably only a handful of
pizza shops in the world, at their peak times, that sell 300 pizzas an hour.

~~~
stickfigure
It also doesn't bake the pizzas. What would an oven look like that can bake
300 pizzas per hr? That's one every 12s.

~~~
lorenzhs
I make lots of pizza for fun with some friends at hacker events. We've managed
to do ~120 portions (not individual pizzas) an hour with an entry-level pizza
oven (2 levels, 60x90cm² area), the kind you see at kebab shops, and the oven
was quite far from being the limiting factor (rolling the dough is hard work).
From a quick web search, conveyor ovens can do up to 150 pizzas per hour, and
you can typically stack them three high. So shouldn't be a problem.

The trick is that pizza is baked at a _very_ high temperature. Our oven goes
up to 500°C (900°F). Baking time is 90s-2min if you put the pizza on the fire
stones directly, or ~3mins if you use a screen (tray).

------
LeanderK
I feel a bit stupid, but does the product look really bad? Why are they hyping
it? I thought it would compete with restaurants, but it really looks like a
frozen pizza. Weird distribution of ingredients, weird dough without a real
crust and not properly baked (compared to for example a pizza baked in real a
wood oven or from from a electrical pizza oven). It certainly doesn't look
like a normal pizza.

~~~
excalibur
You touched on a pretty good point there. It's highly likely that this startup
just reinvented the wheel, and people like DiGiorno already operate a superior
version of this machine.

~~~
graetzer
I remember seeing several videos from different companies with their own
version of a "pizza robot". Just look at this ad for a pizza vending machine
from 2012
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pyrav_9Pbsc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pyrav_9Pbsc)

~~~
Alupis
That vending machine pizza maker doesn't get it right either. It mixes the
dough "fresh"... but that's actually not ideal. The dough needs time to absorb
all the water and time to sit out and be proofed before made into pizza.

Pizza seems simple... until you want something that tastes really good...

------
oldmanpants
It's just adding toppings to pizza (and too much sauce!)... I was hoping to
see how the dough preparation would be automated. I'm sure it could be done,
but I would prefer a hand-made pizza. I enjoy making my own pizzas, and the
dough/crust is what makes the biggest difference in a pie, and is the most
interesting/fun to learn and experiment with.

this robot to me is just the next level up from the skittles sorting robots.

~~~
wpietri
I also have questions about what makes this a robot, because to me this looks
like regular factory machinery.

~~~
mfoy_
I mean, maybe it uses blockchain technology and _definitely_ deserves a crazy
valuation?

~~~
wpietri
Pizza on the blockchain! Tired of your orders getting made wrong? Just put
them in an immutable, distributed database, and you're guaranteed perfect
pizza every time! But don't eat that flawless pie, because our upcoming
SausageCoin™️ ICO guarantees its value will only go up, up, up!

------
chillacy
> More than a third of restaurant owners are having trouble filling jobs...
> And more than 80 percent of workers will change jobs each year, requiring
> employers to constantly train recruits.

Maybe pay people more and treat them better?

But I can see the appeal of restaurant automation. Machines can work 24/7,
don't need health insurance, don't fight for higher wages, don't need to be
trusted around cash registers, etc.

~~~
grecy
> _Maybe pay people more and treat them better?_

How very un-American of you. /s

One thing that always staggers me in endless discussion is that nobody ever,
_ever_ talks about decreasing profits as a way to fix societies problems.

I mean, in 2018 McDonald's returned $8.5 billion to shareholders through share
repurchases and dividends, it announced a 15% increase in its quarterly
dividend to $1.16 per share. [1]

I bet the workers would like some of that.

[1] [https://news.mcdonalds.com/news-releases/news-release-
detail...](https://news.mcdonalds.com/news-releases/news-release-
details/mcdonalds-reports-fourth-quarter-and-full-year-2018-results-and)

~~~
Rainymood
What have the workers done to "earn" this? They literally signed an agreement
to work X hours for Y amount of dollars. They said yes to that. If they wanted
a piece of the equity -- the profits, they should have negotiated for that in
their contract.

~~~
0xffff2
McDonald's and other similar companies are having a hard time convincing
potential employees to sign the existing agreement. If they want to convince
more people to agree to work for them, one option is to offer more money,
which McDonald's at least can certainly afford.

Or, more snarkily, what have the investors done to "earn" this?

------
dragontamer
The video is missing the stretching the dough part, which IMO is the most time
consuming part. Spreading the sauce / cheese and putting toppings is
definitely the "easy" part of the job in my experience.

If I had infinite time to invent my ideal automatic pizza machine... I'd
personally like to see the full high-quality bread cycle done on the dough.
That is: ~1 hour for the bread to rise, punching down the dough, stretch the
dough out onto its final form, ~1-hour for proofing the dough (maybe 20
minutes at 90F, since yeast reacts faster at that temperature), and THEN
automatically spreading cheese on it.

Most of this time is just waiting by the way. But maybe some kind of "jukebox"
design where a robot can work on a Pizza, automatically put it on a shelf
somewhere (for the ~1 hour rise / proofing steps) and come back to it
automatically would be great.

At least, when I manually make pizza, getting high-quality bread dough
techniques on the pizza dough makes a difference in texture (chewiness and
"evenness" of internal air bubbles).

A lot of Pizza shops don't care about the consistency of the dough however.
They just pull the dough out of the frige and immediately make a pizza on it
without the punchdown or proofing steps. And you can tell because of the "air
bubbles" that often grow huge and break the consistency of the dough.

\------------

EDIT: What is going on here, is that yeast is a living organism. Pull that
dough out of storage, and the different yeast will reactivate at different
times. The edges probably will have more active yeast, as it warms up faster).

When the dough enters the oven, it rises to ~110F or so first. The yeast
highly accelerates and starts to produce carbon dioxide as it eats the sugars.
But the "pockets" of highly-active yeast will make more CO2 than other areas
of the dough.

Of course, the yeast dies by ~160F and the "puffiness" of the bread is then
solidified by the heat of the oven.

That's why you punch down dough: so that all the (reactivated) yeast creates
CO2 bubbles at an even rate across the dough.

\------------

In practice, the Pizza is going to be limited by the speed + space of your
Oven. I'm not sure if people need "faster" low quality pizzas, but improving
the automation to create higher-quality pizzas should be the focus.

~~~
Pfhreak
I worked in a Costco, making pizzas all day. The stretching part was achieved
via an oiled hydraulic press. Two big ol' plates of metal squished the dough
out to pizza shape.

You'd transfer it to a metal grate and then sauce, cheese, and top it.
Operation was pretty quick, as long as the dough was in the right condition.

~~~
mrpippy
Costco now has sauce machines as well, basically a big turntable with a
dispenser arm.

[https://www.thrillist.com/eat/nation/how-costco-makes-its-
pi...](https://www.thrillist.com/eat/nation/how-costco-makes-its-pizza)

------
noonespecial
>For starters, the dough preparation, sauce making and baking — the real art
of pizza — is left in the capable, five-fingered hands of people.

So all of the stuff that actually takes time is still manual. All this thing
does is throw down some toppings. And then takes all the time and more it
"saves" to clean it properly and reload it.

Want to see how pizza making is actually automated? Try Totinos.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqULgulLq3Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqULgulLq3Q)

~~~
dsego
You have to wonder why we really need pizza to be round in shape but then they
package it into a rectangular cardboard box. Like there is a whole part of the
machine that takes the leftover dough after cutting the circular shapes. Seems
inefficient.

~~~
contingencies
Its commercially taking subconscious advantage of the consumer who sees "big
box which seems full" but actually gets "circular portion less some". If you
went efficient, your product would be square and look smaller than the
competition.

------
jnwatson
This reminds me of a previous post for the dishwashing robot.

It is automating the easy part. All they are doing is putting toppings and
sauce on. An experienced human can do it perhaps a little slower.

Essentially this big piece of equipment saves the business owner 2 minutes of
an employee making $13 an hour, about 50 cents. At full capacity, 60 an hour,
theoretically it might save $30 an hour. (Practically that won’t happen for
lots of logistical reasons).

It better be quite inexpensive to justify that minor savings.

~~~
behringer
A pizza employee makes much more than 13 hr. There are sick days, holidays,
taxes, fees and lawsuits. For 13/hr employee you're probably looking at 20/hr
at least in costs.

~~~
jandrese
> sick days, holidays

There might be some fancy pizza restaraunts where the staff isn't hourly, but
I don't know of any. Taxes and fees are pretty minimal on a minimum wage
employee, so that leaves lawsuits which I have no idea how to quantize.

~~~
maxerickson
Plenty of hourly employees have holidays and paid time off. Pretty much anyone
that is paid hourly and in a union, for instance.

------
jandrese
One big downside to this is that every topping you add requires yet another
sliding conveyor belt. The demo here can only make cheese, pepperoni,
ham/sausage, and meat lovers pizza.

And just my personal opinion that the pizza that comes out looks pretty damn
sloppy. Those sausage chunks roll around too much. If this were my machine I'd
probably have it only make cheese and pepperoni and have a person on hand to
make other kinds of pizza. Assuming I use this contraption at all.

~~~
smachiz
I would bet you're right - even just doing sauce/cheese/pepperoni is probably
70% of pizzas though.

And you can throw fresh toppings on top of that as a manual last step in 30
seconds before it goes in the oven.

Still seems kinda ridiculous. Watching people in pizza places... seems like
most of the time is spent stretching the dough to be pizza shaped and
appropriate thickness without tears, which this contraption doesn't solve.

Once that's done, people sauce, cheese and top pizzas about as fast as their
ovens seem to work.

------
jpm_sd
How many frozen pizzas does a pizza factory make, per hour? Is that the real
competition?

~~~
Mathnerd314
"G. Mondini pizza assembly lines feature the highest cycle speeds in the
industry - up to 7,200 pizzas per hour."
([https://www.refrigeratedfrozenfood.com/articles/83570-pizza-...](https://www.refrigeratedfrozenfood.com/articles/83570-pizza-
processing-spotlight))

Judging from
[https://youtu.be/Do7qLGiVbwY?t=164](https://youtu.be/Do7qLGiVbwY?t=164), the
advantage is that they have 3 pizzas in each row rather than just one, and
that the pizzas move much faster along the conveyor. It's also not clear from
the article but the Seattle system might only support 1 pizza in the system at
a time.

The dough is still hand-made, which is an advantage over frozen pizza dough
which pretty much sucks, so I'd guess they're primarily interested in selling
to delivery pizza chains as a more upscale pizza. Domino's peak is 160
pizzas/hour and they open stores until the average is <100\.
([https://www.quora.com/How-many-pizzas-does-a-Manhattan-
pizze...](https://www.quora.com/How-many-pizzas-does-a-Manhattan-pizzeria-
sell-each-hour))

~~~
objektif
Sorry to say this but pizzas in that youtube video look disgusting.

~~~
Mathnerd314
Yeah, typically the details of high-quality manufacturing processes are
considered trade secrets and so there aren't videos of them.

I'm not sure if it's the same pizza as the packaging doesn't quite match but
the pizza is similar to this box:
[https://i.redd.it/hrizyz9gnmdz.jpg](https://i.redd.it/hrizyz9gnmdz.jpg)

Here is some cheap Italian brand of frozen pizza, probably higher quality:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tM4n4upANvQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tM4n4upANvQ)

~~~
objektif
Well the Italian brand looks at least a million times better.

------
delinka
How are frozen pizzas currently assembled? I'd have assumed machines with
similar speed. They're only missing the oven.

Am I incorrect? Frozen pizza factories don't use 'robots'?

EDIT: According to videos on YouTube, humans still place the toppings on
frozen pizzas.

~~~
elicash
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Do7qLGiVbwY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Do7qLGiVbwY)

------
ceejayoz
> There are a few details that may save Picnic’s pizzas from tasting as if a
> robot made them. For starters, the dough preparation, sauce making and
> baking — the real art of pizza — is left in the capable, five-fingered hands
> of people.

So it's fundamentally just a sauce and topping sprinkler?

Costco's been using sauce robots for years:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Q0vk_fKDEo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Q0vk_fKDEo)

------
femto113
This seems slower than the manual speeds I observe at the place I go for lunch
slices (Big Mario's, on Pike in Seattle), cooks there just use the back of a
ladle to spread the sauce in a couple seconds. Per the video the robot takes
10 seconds, plus it leaves the sauce in lumps.

Video of Mario's process (they don't show spreading the whole pizza but they
do at least half in the second or so they do show: [https://youtu.be/tXMz-
DxC_dk?t=163](https://youtu.be/tXMz-DxC_dk?t=163)

------
tyfon
I might have missed it from the article but it doesn't seem like the machine
"spins" the dough to get air bubbles into the sides and make a proper crust.

The product on the photo looks like a frozen pizza from a factory tbh..

What is the innovation here? The fact that it is inside a restaurant?

------
gchamonlive
I wonder what are the social implications of these types of machinery.

On the one hand, cheaper means more people can afford it, thus more inclusion.

On the other hand, pizza making is not such a harmful job, comparing to let's
say mining in which a robot actually saves lives, to justify substituting hand
labor. Is it actually leaving people unemployed?

I guess places where cheap food is sold will continue to sell cheap food, so
instead of underpaying someone to do the job, a robot does this, leaving
people free to do more intellectually demanding jobs.

I guess the real question is then, how can we reallocate people and give them
better, more meaningful jobs and not leave them helpless.

Don't get me wrong. Any form of job is respectable. There is always going to
be demand for higher quality versions of the same product, where, hopefully
people are not underpaid. I mean better job in comparing to poor working
conditions.

~~~
thefounder
In the end all the "manual/hand labour" will/should be replaced by robots.
Which one are automated first depends by the difficulty of the job and
economics. Unfortunately there will always be low skilled and high skilled
jobs. We already have low skill jobs in the IT(i.e data entry)

~~~
petra
This probably also applies to cognitive jobs.

Maybe, if we're lucky, we'll be left with jobs that require interpersonal
skills.

------
cjf4
At first I scoffed, because making good pizza is essentially the same as
making good bread, which is more of an art than a science.

After reading through, it became apparent that this isn't geared at good
pizza, it's focused on bad pizza where none of that matters, like cafeterias,
gas stations, and football stadiums.

~~~
krapht
You know, I completely disagree with the your first sentence. Of all cooking
techniques, baking seems to me to be the most scientific. You must carefully
control temperature and moisture in order to get a decent loaf. It's
practically an exercise in chemical engineering once you start adding things
like chemical leaveners.

~~~
WilliamEdward
Chemical engineering? Isn't mixing chemicals just chemistry?

Regardless, there is no standard for baking, each little extra bit of yeast,
sugar, etc. you add in can make it an entirely different product. This gives
it its own personal craft aspect, hence why it can be an art.

~~~
mattkrause
Those are different recipes, but I'm not sure that's where the "art" comes in.

The challenge of baking is that the components aren't very standardized. You
won't get a consistently good result by robotically mixing 1000.0g flour with
7.00 g yeast and 650 mL distilled 35˚C water, and mixing for 400 seconds. The
flour varies from bag to bag, even of the same brand. Yeast is alive and
responds differently depending on the temperature and other conditions;
sourdough cultures are even more finicky.

As a result, there's an "art" to knowing when to add more water/flour or
deciding when the bread is ready to shape and bake. I would bet you could get
this _more_ under control in a commercial/industrial setting, where you've got
proofing cabinets that control the ambient temp/humidity and other specialized
equipment. At home though, you've more or less got to do it by feel.

------
elindbe2
Something tells me the machines at the frozen pizza factory have been making
more than 300 pizzas an hour for a long time.

------
pkaye
It doesn't roll out the dough which is probably the most labor intensive step.

~~~
waiseristy
As well as cleaning out this monstrosity every day

------
aioobe
How is it different from the manufacturing of pizzas you buy frozen in the
grocery stores?

------
m0zg
I wish someone automated electricians and plumbers instead. Most of those guys
charge an arm and a leg and are booked months in advance. I spent a month
trying to get someone to come in and install a NEMA 14-50 outlet in my garage.
Automating $15/hr jobs is just weird. The people who work in those jobs
usually also man the cash registers, make the dough, clean up, take calls,
etc. You aren't going to replace something like that with a glorified frozen
pizza maker, even if your investors think otherwise.

------
magnamerca
I was in the SF airport the other day and I tried an automated coffee
dispensing machine that actually tasted really good. Way better than the old
machines. I think it was called Briggo. You connected to it with your phone,
and you made your own custom "barista" style coffee profile.

I can imagine this sort of thing replacing drive-through coffee shops,
especially here in Canada where drive-through coffee is ridiculously popular,
and the lines are notoriously long.

------
reaperducer
300 pizzas an hour sounds like quite an achievement. But are they any good?

The quality of pizza varies so much from one restaurant to another that it
doesn't matter how many pizzas it makes of they're not any better than human-
made pizzas.

Sure, robots may lower the cost of a pizza. But the majority of pizza
consumers will choose to pay a little more for better pizza. Little Caesar's
tried the uber-cheap but garbage pizza model years ago and eventually had to
improve its product.

~~~
imglorp
Don't forget the food factories (Elios, Tombstone etc) turn out many thousands
of pizzas an hour.

This is distributed, just-in-time, made to order manufacturing.

------
anotheryou
The challenge is not to build a machine that makes pizzas but more:

\- individual toppings

\- small enough to fit in a pizza shop

\- not too expensive

everything else seems solved by frozen pizza manufacturers (though there is a
suprising ammount of hand-tossing ingridients involved, morzarella seems to be
especially hard :) )
[https://youtu.be/DTnevo7XPqA?t=90](https://youtu.be/DTnevo7XPqA?t=90)

------
amelius
I want a robot that can make arbitrary meals, not one which can only make one
type of dish (these already exist in factories in various forms and are
nothing new).

And when you think about it, a robot cook would save more time per day than a
self-driving car.

------
YZF
One cool thing you can do here (old idea of mine) is that you can allow
customers to fully customize their pizza's toppings. Imagine an app where you
can "draw" your pizza and then get exactly what you ordered.

------
yardie
> We were using frozen dough and an electric oven for the demonstration

The main reason I go to a pizza restaurant is for the fresh ingredients. A lot
of the reason I hate frozen pizza is because the crust tastes like cardboard.

~~~
president
I imagine this is for people who frequent McDonalds, Taco Bell, et al.

------
sarego
What comes to mind is
[https://rotimatic.com/home/](https://rotimatic.com/home/). They have been
shipping roti/pizza makers for a few years now.

------
agumonkey
Is there a place where people discuss societal theories about (in an ideal
future) entirely workless life ? Not that I'm for it or even convinced it will
hold but I'm curious about the subject.

------
Upvoter33
This is hilarious: automating the creation of crappy pizza. Seriously, we
can't even build a decent auto-espresso machine.

------
okonomiyaki3000
I hope he's cutting them each into 6 slices because I'm not hungry enough to
eat 2400 per hour.

------
wayanon
This is for the deliveroo/just eat market, not artisanal wood-fired places.

------
noja
Why doesn't it also drop the ingredients when the arm is coming back in?

~~~
kube-system
Probably to keep the momentum of the ingredients at zero in the x/y axes

------
wayanon
These machines will be perfect for places that sell via delivery apps.

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prawn
I've long dreamed of taco robots. Please someone work on that!

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JaceLightning
Not to sound too critical, but isn't this just digiorno?

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baybal2
What a nice invention. It reminds me of an smt line

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rullopat
Not a machine for the Italian market for sure.

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systematical
The New York robots make a better pizza.

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ptah
in the video, does each little conveyor do one ingredient? what about food
allergies and special dietary requirements where you can't use tools for e.g.
dairy/meat to process vegetables

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GrryDucape
The best part is that it tastes exactly like fast food because the robot, like
fast food workers, also doesn't want to be making shitty pizza for you.

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supernova87a
I hate to delve into this controversial area in such a throwaway story --
but...

The cost of labor (and living) in this country (California in particular), is
making everything terrible. And at the root of it, it's driven by people with
good intentions piling on restrictive regulation after restrictive regulation
about housing, safety, liability, etc.

Everything that you might choose to complain about stems from the high cost of
employing anyone -- and related to that (I genuinely lament), how much it
costs to barely live around here.

BART and buses suck? It's because we cannot hire enough station agents, police
officers, maintenance staff, etc to properly man the system.

Your commute sucks? Because you have to live so far away to afford anything
reasonable in rent or mortgage.

Restaurants suck? It's because again, labor is expensive, land is artificially
expensive because of restricted supply.

Pizza sucks? It's because you can't open a pizza place (except staffed by
underpaid immigrants) at any reasonable cost, and instead have to resort to
robots that can't get a crust right.

This is a major problem -- our country is not getting so much older like some
countries, yet our costs are in runaway mode. Something is wrong with this
picture.

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gamblor956
Labor costs more in the UK, France, and Germany for those roles and they're
all doing fine.

