“Zume wasn’t a robot company,” Albrecht said, but rather a company that pitched a big-data approach to predicting pizza demand to efficiently place its trucks. But Albrecht argues that calling Zume’s setup a pizza robot was always a stretch. The best-funded robot-pizza startup to date, Zume Pizza, imploded in early 2020 after absorbing $375 million in funding from SoftBank Vision Fund, the same venture capital firm that plowed billions into WeWork before its collapse. But there’s an argument in the industry.Ī handful of other companies, such as Seattle’s Picnic and the Bay Area’s XRobotics, make machines designed to be installed in standard restaurant kitchens, or just placed on a countertop, that can automatically prep a pizza with sauce and toppings a human can then pop the assembled pie into the oven. Robotic arms like Flippy from Miso Robotics are getting cheap enough to make financial sense for low-wage work. Technology and the Internet The new burger chef makes $3 an hour and never goes home. Hundreds of thousands of people work at Domino’s locations, and difficulty hiring in the last year has cut into the chain’s delivery business - on a corporate earnings call in April, Domino’s announced that it would continue to offer customers $3 in store credit to pick up their own pizza instead of ordering delivery, a pandemic-era promotion. It takes an army of human workers to make all that dough. and more than 19,000 worldwide, according to its latest financial filings. With franchises and company-owned stores, it has 6,597 locations in the U.S. That demand was met by 75,117 pizza restaurants nationwide in 2021, with Domino’s leading the industry in sales. The global pizza market is estimated at about $130 billion in sales, according to Pizza Magazine’s 2022 Pizza Power Report, and more than a third of that business is in the U.S., where Americans spent about $45 billion on pizza in 2021. Humans - and especially Americans - eat a lot of pizza. “The universal appeal of pizza is what makes it the tip of the spear for startups looking to get into food automation.” “Pizza is a massive opportunity, and so a lot of players are getting into the space,” said Chris Albrecht, an industry expert who writes the food automation newsletter OttOmate.
And with slim labor costs and a chef that never eats, sleeps or takes a break, the team behind Stellar Pizza think they can take a bite out of the country’s $45-billion pizza market - or at least the part of the pie that’s dominated by high-volume, low-cost chains.īenson Tsai started the company in 2019, after leaving a job designing batteries for spacecraft and satellites at SpaceX, the Elon Musk-helmed rocket company around the corner from Stellar’s headquarters. It costs just $7 to order (or as much as $10, depending on toppings). In 45 seconds, a finished pizza pops out. Cameras and sensors track the progress from step to step, making tiny adjustments along the way. On a conveyor belt, a nozzle spits out sauce, dispensers shake cheese and toppings on top, then a robotic lift carries the raw pie to one of four 900-degree deck ovens. A press then smashes the dough into a 12-inch disc. Inside the machine, a box roughly the size of a cargo van, a metal claw plucks a ball of premade dough out of its refrigerated chamber. In an office park in Hawthorne, a robot built by rocket scientists is making pizza.
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