Sounds like a really, really over-engineered solution. Especially since, as the article states, people want hand-crafted food nowadays.
The pizzerias that are thriving right now are the ones making neapolitan style pizza in wood ovens, Pizza Hut and Little Caesars barely exist around here anymore.
> The pizzerias that are thriving right now are the ones making neopolitan style pizza in wood ovens
Right now in NYC the going price for a Neopolitan-style Margherita pizza is something like $14. If you could get that down to even $8 for the same quality then that would be a huge win. Even if the robots couldn't make the dough, just getting them to the point where they can make the tomato sauce and put the sauce and cheese on the pizza and manage the cooking would be a substantial improvement.
Having moving trucks and a single centralized kitchen seems like a potentially viable way to do that in NYC, as well. Lower rent because your actual kitchen is in Queens and the pizza bakes as it moves.
how many pizza pies do you sell a night? and how much does a pizzaiolo make a night? I don't think the economics are there for automatization given how robotically complicated would be to actually make a thin crust wood fired pizza and how fast and consistently a trained pizzaiolo can do it in comparison.
"Around here" being the operative words. For those of us that choose to not live in urban environments, hand-crafted foods are much more scarce. I think there's a pretty large market for these guys to pop up stores in cities that aren't close to large cities.
And if they can get their costs down with automation I'm sure they'd find a way to make a profit in urban areas as well. After some time at the brewery, a $3.50 pizza is pretty attractive.
"Sounds like a really, really over-engineered solution. Especially since, as the article states, people want hand-crafted food nowadays."
And in the next sentence, the quoted analyst says that automation can play into this trend by taking over repetitive tasks. In this case, it looks like you're getting more freshly hand-tossed crust and more freshly prepped ingredients than your typical chain.
I'm not that enthusiastic about the standard American pizza either, but as a popular way of feeding a family or group, it seems like an interesting target for automation. I agree that this is outrageously over-engineered - I imagine that this is a working prototype and that they hope to make a solution for a fraction of the cost and reproduce it across the country. This strikes me as a gamble, but not entirely crazy.
That's also true in the wealthy, cosmopolitan urban centre that I live in, but if you go out to the suburbs you might be surprised at the number of pizza huts.
I got a good laugh seeing them using a $100,000+ 6-axis automotive assembly-line robot to move a pizza 90 degrees from a conveyor to an oven. Overkill to say the least. This is laughably overengineered.
As someone that eats their pizzas weekly, they are way better than "supermarket pizzas". In my opinion, they taste better and are significantly less expensive than local competition.
I mean, it's not unimaginable that supermarket, factory-made pizza also involves Jira and Kanban. Why not involve the best manufacturing practices when making something?
At the Stern school, first term part time MBA students were told to go to the streets and observe pizza places (so many in the city). Come back and build a business plan.
Wasn't long before students saw how much there was to be made on a slice and that cheese is the most expensive part of the pie.
Personally, perhaps because of the population of Italian heritage near me, I simply avoid pizza places that seem like a business, not a life vocation.
At least around me, the small Pizzerias don't have much turnover. It's the same two or three guys running the place year in and out (but that's in the Hudson Valley/NYC area).
I guess this would be attractive to Dominos or Pizza Hut.
This seems like an overengineered problem for food. I don't get how all of the capital expense can be justified for the ever slimming margins of food production? Do they plan to scale it up? Others have mentioned pizza factories and wouldn't that be their competition? I don't get it.
If they suss it out for one place, they can roll it out to many places. So yes scaling up is the whole idea.
Pizza factories make pizzas in batches, like 2000 times pizza Y. And they get frozen, no need for an oven.
Here you need to make X, Y and Z pizza for this order. Then just an X. Then 2 Y's and a Z. All need to be made from scratch and end up hot in a pizzabox. So quite different from the factory.
It would be interesting to hear what they think the net gain is. Some places are pretty optimised already. Little Caesars, for example, usually has only 2 or 3 workers.
The article says that can make about 10x as many pizzas as a similarly staffed pizzaria. Along with their delivery innovations, it seems like they could serve a wider area and deliver pizzas much faster, especially at peak hours. The last bit strikes me as important: I really haven't ordered much pizza since the early 00's because at peak hours it could take 20 minutes or an hour - if it was a reliable 20 minute delivery, it might be more tempting (especially if automation grants some quality improvements).
I wonder if there's some business opportunity there. I would guess a pool of drivers that serve more than one pizza chain might be more efficient than ones assigned to a specific company. Or maybe the pizza companies have some vision to leverage their own driver networks for things other than pizza?
A multi-pizzeria network of drivers might work; they could call themselves Deliverators.
After all, like Stephenson said, when you get down to it America really only does four things very well. Music, movies, microcode, and high-speed pizza delivery.
>Maybe the answer is that margins are so slim in the food business that any significant reduction in cost is bigger than it appears?
Seems so. We've got people saying labor is the biggest cost for a restaurant or pizzeria, but that necessitates asking: holy shit, how can the value-add of a fresh, hot pizza over its unprepared ingredients be so low that it's worth cutting wages to below $8/hour by robotizing the work? If pizza really takes that much value as input, why does it have so little value as output?
> We've got people saying labor is the biggest cost for a restaurant or pizzeria, but that necessitates asking: holy shit, how can the value-add of a fresh, hot pizza over its unprepared ingredients be so low that it's worth cutting wages to below $8/hour by robotizing the work?
In a competitive market, it's always worth reducing the cost of inputs. The restaurant business is generally a competitive market (it's actually a bit worse than an ideal competitive market for participants, because there are usually lots of unsustainable competitors selling below cost and losing money.)
>(it's actually a bit worse than an ideal competitive market for participants, because there are usually lots of unsustainable competitors selling below cost and losing money.)
This sounds like the problem. Shouldn't the government do something about these anticompetitive practices? I don't think a good economy involves "charities" driving the restaurant business to extinction.
There are many Walter Mittys out "playing restauranteur" and no, I don't think the government should be in the business of telling people they're bad at business and stopping them from doing it. It's not like the local restaurant of the day is going to dump food on the market in mass quantities hoping to create and exploit a monopoly later.
It's actually caused by the structure of the restaurant industry itself. Almost all restaurants, even ones that become successful in the long term, lose money for the first few years. It's not the huge restaurants trying to price smaller ones out (although I'm sure this happens), it's amateur restauranteurs trying to break into the industry.
I think you're assuming that the restaurants intend to be selling below cost. Running a restaurant is one of those businesses that everyone seems to think they can do.
A somewhat common problem on Kitchen Nightmares was owners who didn't know how much they were spending on labor or food.
> This sounds like the problem. Shouldn't the government do something about these anticompetitive practices?
You mean, government should prevent owners from subsidizing operating costs as they try to establish and scale a business? Even if government wanted to do this in general (which would destroy Silicon Valley), how would it ever enforce it against millions of local small businesses, many of whom are doing it not out of deliberate strategy but simply out of lack of business skill?
And, more importantly, how do you do it without creating barriers to entry that are themselves anticompetitive in a way which is much more consumer hostile?
I think one reason minimum wage labor is expensive for a business has nothing to do with the hourly wage and everything to do with turnover, showing up late and not caring about getting things done right. Robots don't get hung over or ask for overtime or time off.
I can see quite a few places from pizza to fast food where a little automation could greatly improve the quality and consistency of food.
While traveling we hit a Pizza Hut. I hadn't been to one in years and wasn't expecting much. It was shockingly good. Fast forward a few days and we foolishly gambled again and they set a new bar for low. Same chain, same ingredients, same order - the only thing different were the people. If we can replicate the people who know how to make a good pizza and replace the ones who can't - I'm all for it.
While that is likely true, the ROI as much faster with a 15/hr min wage. Ensuring that more and more companies automate at a faster rate, when we as a society have done nothing to address the problem this creates.
We (society) are increasing the minimum wage with out figuring out what to do with all the unemployable people that do not have the education, experience, or in some cases the talent to command a wage that high. The belief is that companies will just "eat" the added costs because they are simply greedy today and can "afford" to pay more, these types of robots prove this will not be the result and what will be the result is massive unemployment
> These types of robots prove this will not be the result and what will be the result is massive unemployment
Massive unemployment for certain jobs is unavoidable at this point. Serves no purpose to condemn workers for several decades to survive with really low salaries. If there are greater efficiencies due to automation, everyone should be participating on the value created (insert basic income theories here or other similar policies)
As for the minimum wage... what can I say. Going to 15$ doesn't seem to be the end of the world. Adjusting for inflation, current minimum wage is really on lowest value for the decade and about median for the last 60 years. Considering how much economy has expanded in 60 years, seems like a very raw deal for workers in certain sectors.
This is pretty awesome. As someone who makes pizza at home about once a week I have a few minor observations:
1. Only flour and water in the dough? What about yeast and salt?
2. Whenever I make pizza the dough is rather sticky. I wonder how they keep the parks from being clogged up by sticky dough.
As a complete aside, having tried both Italian pizza in Italy and americanized pizza I actually prefer American style with it's more cheese, more sauce, and diced meets instead of whole slices. But I'm sure it is also way more calories.
I would guess they could borrow a few ideas from the frozen pizza industry. But the scale is very different, and frozen pizza factories don't have the oven to deal with.
This is a submarine article (http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html), an ad for zume pizza. Food manufacturers already have frozen pizza down to a precise science, and automate more than this startup. I've been watching the food technology space for some time, and this companys only innovation is putting pizza ovens in delivery trucks.
If you think frozen pizza is a replacement for freshly made pizza (regardless of what makes it), then you must not have any taste buds.
A fresh pizza has qualities in the dough and especially in the meats that just don't carry over to a frozen pizza. One is a proper dinner, the other is a backup plan.
The pizzerias that are thriving right now are the ones making neapolitan style pizza in wood ovens, Pizza Hut and Little Caesars barely exist around here anymore.