
Little Caesars Has a Patent for a Pizza-Making Machine - michaewolf
https://thespoon.tech/scoop-little-caesars-has-a-patent-for-a-pizza-making-robot/
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TipVFL
The future of pizza is self-driving pizza ovens. It sounds ridiculous, but
just imagine a pizza delivery place that has no physical store, no employees,
and can deliver you a pizza in 15 minutes, fresh out of the oven.

It seems inevitable.

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ams6110
It would be a little challenging. A proper pizza oven is about five or six
hundred degrees minimum, and the pie bakes in 5 to 10 minutes or maybe less in
some cases. And when it's done the toppings and sauce and cheese are pretty
much a liquid. Going around the corner too fast will slosh at all to one side.

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platz
If it only takes that long, it could just cook while parked at destination

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bllguo
what? you sure you thought this through? So instead of having one kitchen
producing pizzas all day long, you cut off half (or worse) of that productive
time for traveling around?

All this complexity just to save on the cost of having some land to put a
bunch of ovens sounds absolutely ludicrous.

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jjeaff
I'd say the point of cooking en route is not for productivity but for
freshness.

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HeyLaughingBoy
The point of the pizzeria (at least for its owners) is to make money. If
you're spending 5 minutes at the destination cooking a pizza, that's either
going to be one expensive pizza or the pizzeria is going out of business in a
few months.

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platz
It's going to be one expensive pizza, of course. That is the target market.
Think gated communities, high property-tax areas, etc..

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baxter001
The sauce part isn't new
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Q0vk_fKDEo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Q0vk_fKDEo)

Nor is the oven:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZW_Maj0g8cg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZW_Maj0g8cg)

Nor are dry ingredient spreaders for anything from cheese to sliced meats
regularly used at an industrial scale for frozen pizza and bruschetta already.

The fact that all the components exist but aren't in common use in delivery
pizza isn't due to lack of innovation in the area, more likely it's cheaper
with better throughput to have the labour of 4 pizza chefs rather than the
expertise to keep an assemblage of these machines running in all the local
pizza places.

For the industrial and frozen segment they make perfect sense, but on the
"hot" pizza side they're probably more useful in collective bargaining than
anything else.

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aphextron
>The fact that all the components exist but aren't in common use in delivery
pizza isn't due to lack of innovation in the area, more likely it's cheaper
with better throughput to have the labour of 4 pizza chefs rather than the
expertise to keep an assemblage of these machines running in all the local
pizza places.

I think this is what it comes down to. I was picking up a pizza at Dominos the
other day, and while the girl was ringing up my order, she was also taking
calls for orders and manually entering them into the computer. The workload
for one person seemed absurd. I started wondering "why on earth doesn't
dominos just staff a call center in India and have the orders forwarded to the
store's ticketing system?".

And then I realized It's because that would be a cost center, and the food
industry is already on tiny margins (<2%) as it is. It is simply cheaper and
easier to offload all of that work onto a $9/hr employee you're already paying
that will be replaced every 3 months after burning out. Modern capitalism has
become brutally efficient at the expense of humanity.

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derefr
> I started wondering "why on earth doesn't dominos just staff a call center
> in India and have the orders forwarded to the store's ticketing system?".

Or, y'know, Twilio. Voice recognition on limited grammars (such as pizza
toppings + addresses) is already crazy good. And the system can always repeat
back what the customer said to confirm it parsed it correctly.

Or, go one step further: have no phone number, only a website. There's an
cellular MVNO in Canada
([https://www.publicmobile.ca/](https://www.publicmobile.ca/)) that operates
using this cost-cutting model, and they seem to be doing pretty well.

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Scoundreller
I have the nagging feeling that Telus is trying to kill the PublicMobile
'experiment' by transitioning their customers to Koodo before the bury the
coffin.

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yetanotheruser
Why are there ads all over the place for public mobile then?

It is weird that they were redirecting their customers to Koodo when they
stopped offering a certain favorable plan.

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ams6110
Cheese and sauce spreading utensils have been available for decades and a lot
of pizzerias use them. They're especially helpful for portion control. Not so
sure about pepperoni, but doesn't seem like it would be much of a challenge
especially something like a slicer that cuts solid pepperoni sausages and
flings the slices onto the pie.

I'd be more impressed with a robot that could flatten, spread, and toss a ball
of dough, that's a bit more of an art form.

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marak830
We have machines for that. Btw you don't need to toss the dough, that's just
for looks, as for flattening and spreading, it's fairly standard and straight
forward if everything is portion controlled correctly.

Source: 17 year chef and recently helped a friend setup a highly successful
pizza shop.

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roflchoppa
thats a shame, one of my local pizza makers used to serve dime bags with the
pizza. robots cant do that :p

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TipVFL
Here in Oregon they could.

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roflchoppa
is it supposed to be a means to an end, or do I get to know the robot? :p

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Keverw
They have a pizza vending machine which makes and cooks a fresh pizza.

[https://youtu.be/j7_lxiU8eLM](https://youtu.be/j7_lxiU8eLM)

I heard years ago they were going to have these in a large theme park in
Orlando, but the article didn't which mention one. Not sure if it ever
happened.

Here's a video I just found of someone using one:
[https://youtu.be/tTLXzF5u13I](https://youtu.be/tTLXzF5u13I)

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chiph
Replacing higher operational costs (from laws mandating a higher minimum wage)
with a one-time capital cost. Bound to happen.

The local McDonalds now has kiosk ordering.

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Keverw
I heard they were going to start doing that. Haven't happened here where I am.
I wonder if you can tell it you don't want onions or pickles like you can tell
a worker on your burgers, since I'm a bit of a picky eater.

I also wonder if touch screens spread more germs, but I guess you could argue
the same for door knobs anyways.

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mercer
The kiosks over here allow you to customize your order, and I assume they're
the same everywhere.

It does appear that the kiosks are limited to removing the default
ingredients, rather than allowing extra ingredients. Maybe this is a general
policy change, but in the past I recall asking for bacon on a bacon-less
burger and getting it. So could be that ordering with a person still has an
advantage in some cases.

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megaman22
Hey, maybe they can either make their terrible pizza even cheaper, or maybe
make less terrible pizza for the same price.

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tyingq
There's worse. Ultra cheap buffet pizza like Cici's. Little Caesars isn't
great, but it's edible.

Little Caesar's gets its cheese from Leprino, same supplier as more expensive
(and also "meh") chain pizza places.

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Turing_Machine
Getting the cheese from the same supplier doesn't mean it's the same cheese. I
expect that they produce a somewhat different product for each major customer.

Little Caesars is completely inedible to my taste.

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tyingq
As far as I know, Leprino doesn't have any low end or "fake cheese" products.
Just saying the ingredients are on par with other uninspired chain pizza, but
not pure garbage.

Little Caesars does skimp on quantity. Like 2 pepperoni per slice, and perhaps
less cheese, for example.

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Turing_Machine
There are a lot of gradations of quality between top-end cheese and fake
cheese.

I would be _extremely_ surprised if a customer the size of Little Caesars or
Dominos doesn't specify its requirements down to the smallest detail.

Those details would be considered proprietary information and/or trade
secrets, of course, so neither the cheese company nor the pizza chain would be
interested in discussing it or making it public information.

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tyingq
Hrm okay. I don't see much difference between Domino's, Pizza Hut, Papa John's
and Little Caesar's. They are all edible, but meh...none of them terrible, but
no real difference or real "mmm" factor. I go to specific mom and pop places
that do NY style pizza that's actually good. Most of the good ones seem to use
Lisante ingredients. Can't think of a chain place that's memorable.

Might be different if I lived in NYC or Chicago. Here in Texas, just mom-and-
pop vs chain is the real difference. Fwiw, most of them are Albanian owned vs
Italian. Outside of the Northeast US, there isn't much real pizza
lineage/history/culture.

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pascalxus
The future of Pizza is a 3D printer at home that prints out your dinner right
at your dinner table.

No, make that printed directly into your stomach, via a plugin.

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kiba
But then we won't be able to experience the taste and chewing.

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lithos
If you're at Little Caesars/Pizza Hut, that's not something you care about.

