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Pizza robot makes 300 pizzas per hour

253 points| starpilot | 6 years ago |geekwire.com | reply

347 comments

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[+] wonderwonder|6 years ago|reply
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.

[+] perl4ever|6 years ago|reply
"a couple more years of improvements and you could have a machine able to reliably do the work of 2- 3 employees"

I see frozen uncooked pizza in stores. I feel like it existed 20-30 years ago too although I'm not sure exactly. Surely these are not hand made.

Whenever I read about impending automation, I wonder which millennium I'm in.

[+] chooseaname|6 years ago|reply
> 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.

The problem with that is the people who would be in a position to make change don't feel the constriction of the immediacy of it and those who do are rarely invited to the table to talk.

[+] dalbasal|6 years ago|reply
"entry level jobs like fast food / picking crops / warehouses"

These things are very hard to predict. We have a long history of such "automations" and the outcomes have been often unpredictable. Effectively, "automation" is interchangeable with any labour saving tech. Production lines, tractors, etc.

Agriculture basically did shed jobs due to the green revolution and mechanisation. Fewer farmers grew the food and people moved to towns. You could argue that towns pulled agricultural workers in rather than automation pushing, but machines replaced people regardless.

Industrial manufacturing, OTOH, increased output and added jobs to the sector for hundreds of years despite labour saving "automation" progressing constantly.

It's only recently that manufacturing employment plateaued. Global trade and other shifts have caused some severe job shedding locally, but even that is only in the last 30-40 years. The long term trend was more automation and more jobs.

Computers landed on every desk very fast. Typists, mailrooms, secretaries and other such "entry" jobs became mostly obsolete. Still, the "white collar" and administration sectors experienced massive employment growth since the 80s.

Think of colleges, with their ever rising admins/academics ratio even as "administration automation" technologies became available.

When it comes to something like automating restaurants it's so dependant on "consumer preferences" and food culture that I wouldn't hazard any guesses.

Prepared food isn't a commodity and restaurants aren't driven by efficiency. There's no hard, purely rational reason why one burger is worth €3 and another is worth €20.

McDonald's us extremely efficient, in terms of labour cost per bite, but most newer competitors compete by being less "efficient" and more "artisinal."

[+] petra|6 years ago|reply
The thing is: robot videos are viral.

That doesn't mean white collar jobs, even those that are high-skilled aren't at big risk.

You just need to look at the rate AI is advancing, the amounts of startups and money aiming at white collar jobs, and what's waiting in research.

[+] bobloblaw45|6 years ago|reply
>While this iteration of the product seems like it is not ready for prime time

Yeah just looking at it I couldn't stop myself from imagining how nasty it's bound to get after getting put to work full time. Too many nooks and crannies and it would need to be easy to tear down and put together again for cleaning.

[+] abfan1127|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] lkrubner|6 years ago|reply
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.

[+] nkoren|6 years ago|reply
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

[+] limomium|6 years ago|reply
Making them round is so inefficient for the machines. Make 'em long -- that way you merely need to pass dough through a conveyor. Then, use the money you saved on the simpler machinery to do an advertizing campaign to change the public's perception of what shape a pizza should be.

The boxes are already square. Two long rectangle pizzas in a box. As a bonus, it's easy to pack two DIFFERENT pizzas with different toppings into a mixed box, for group orders. And variety.

[+] onlyrealcuzzo|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] ehsankia|6 years ago|reply
It also doesn't include the dough preparation or the cooking, although the latter can be done by connecting the output of this to the input of a conveyor oven.
[+] mdturnerphys|6 years ago|reply
Their website says 300 pizzas/hr for 12" pizzas and 180 pizzas/hr for 18". Maybe that's the 18"?

(Disclosure: My brother worked for this company for about a year.)

[+] BillinghamJ|6 years ago|reply
Perhaps it takes into account the % of pizzas which have a certain number of additional toppings. Presumably Margherita pizzas can take much less time?
[+] LeanderK|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] InvisibleCities|6 years ago|reply
I am with you. I cannot for the life of me imagine who would want this machine. Companies that mass produce frozen pizzas have industrial processes that would put this gizmo to shame in terms of consistency and output volume. For restaurants, this machine looks like it would require so much maintenance to keep it working and sufficiently sanitary for use in a commercial kitchen that I am not even sure that it would offer any labor savings over a traditional pizza operation, and that is before you consider the fact that those pizzas look completely unappetizing.
[+] zerocrates|6 years ago|reply
Looks like pretty standard "cafeteria pizza" (non-rectangular division)
[+] hop|6 years ago|reply
Yeah, that’s a terrible looking pizza, weird they would publicly demo it with that thing as the product.
[+] Mathnerd314|6 years ago|reply
The picture is frozen dough and an electric oven. Presumably they'd use better dough in a real restaurant.
[+] oldmanpants|6 years ago|reply
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.

[+] maxerickson|6 years ago|reply
8 pepperoni and 6 pounds of sausage.

I think this isn't really aimed at people seeking the joy of pizza, it's aimed at people selling slices in a stadium. There's a lot of those.

[+] wpietri|6 years ago|reply
I also have questions about what makes this a robot, because to me this looks like regular factory machinery.
[+] holy_city|6 years ago|reply
Consumer (and I assume commercial) bread machines often have a "dough only" cycle that you can use for automating your dough process. But I'd like one with a water filter and more granular control over the germ time, temperature, rise time, and knead strength/time all in one widget. Something with multiple wet/dry hampers and a programmable cycle would be really cool too.
[+] fyfy18|6 years ago|reply
Domino's (yes maybe not everyone's idea of perfect pizza) has a good video explaining how their dough is made. They have a production line that mixes, kneads and balls the dough, then it just needs to be placed into trays by a human. It is shipped fresh to restaurants, so proofs in transit.

https://youtu.be/jPQ87J_5qyw

[+] chillacy|6 years ago|reply
> 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|6 years ago|reply
> 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...

[+] jandrese|6 years ago|reply
What pizza shop offers health insurance?

I completely agree that if you're offering a minimum wage hourly job with no benefits you don't get to complain about difficulties finding staff and retaining them. They have tons of options at that price point if they want to switch jobs. If you want to avoid having to constantly deal with turnover you need to offer more.

[+] megaremote|6 years ago|reply
Do you really imagine a lot of people would the satisfied working in a pizza restaurant for life?
[+] PhasmaFelis|6 years ago|reply
Yeah, it's funny how the same people who say they're desperate for more/more reliable labor will also tell you that paying their workers better is laughably impossible.
[+] dragontamer|6 years ago|reply
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.

[+] noonespecial|6 years ago|reply
>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

[+] dsego|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] jnwatson|6 years ago|reply
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.

[+] jandrese|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
How many frozen pizzas does a pizza factory make, per hour? Is that the real competition?
[+] Mathnerd314|6 years ago|reply
"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-...)

Judging from 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...)

[+] wizzard|6 years ago|reply
I was confused about this too. I think the win here is that the machine is small enough to actually fit in a fast-food restaurant. Plus, they're planning to branch out from pizza.
[+] Rychard|6 years ago|reply
I assume such factories employ machinery that isn't suitable for use elsewhere. Additionally, it seems unlikely that such machinery would have been designed to produce individual customized pizzas on an as-needed basis, whereas this seems built specifically to address both of those points.

I'm no pizza connoisseur, but the pizzas in that video don't look particularly appetizing.

[+] delinka|6 years ago|reply
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.

[+] ceejayoz|6 years ago|reply
> 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

[+] femto113|6 years ago|reply
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

[+] tyfon|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
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.

[+] cjf4|6 years ago|reply
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.

[+] elindbe2|6 years ago|reply
Something tells me the machines at the frozen pizza factory have been making more than 300 pizzas an hour for a long time.
[+] pkaye|6 years ago|reply
It doesn't roll out the dough which is probably the most labor intensive step.
[+] aioobe|6 years ago|reply
How is it different from the manufacturing of pizzas you buy frozen in the grocery stores?