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.

Why did they make it with an arm? All of this can be done with much simpler machinery. Hell, Costco already has an automatic sauce spreader.

ETA: Put some slicers on it and you have the selling point of having really fresh ingredients.

ETA2: DiGiorno already figured out how to automate pizza production.