Pizza restaurants: Why pizza-making robots are not cutting it

Kindell previously used Picnic’s robots at T-Mobile Park, home of the Seattle Mariners, a baseball team.

Usually, he’d need about 10 people to make pizza in such a setup. With the robots that number fell to just two.

So I’m not familiar with the T-Mobile Park setup and I don’t know which specific robot they used, but I found a video demo of the Picnic robot. There is no way that system reduces the number of employees from 10 to 2.

First off you don’t need 10 people to make a pizza. The robot does the “toppings” step, which is the easiest step. You know how I know it’s the easiest step? When you have kids pizza making parties guess which step the kids do? The toppings step.

If he had said it takes 3 people to make a pizza and the robot brings it down to 2, or that the robot speeds up production by 30% or so, that’s believable.

Also the pizza making machine is huge. You’re losing a whole prep area with that thing. If you’re only making pizza then maybe that’s ok, but most pizza places I’ve been too also make sandwiches or other things. A robot making things is a novelty so maybe if you plan a new restaurant with this specifically in mind you can justify the space, but I don’t see this fitting into an existing kitchen.