Overcooked? Why robotic pizza makers are failing

serhack_

Half baked product: https://weli.dev/blog/half-baked-product/

monkeydust

> Many people enjoy hand-crafted pizza, though, I suggest. Doesn't a machine making your dinner take away the human connection we might otherwise feel with food? " Not just pizza/food ...but this applies to emails and written documents now.

VeejayRampay

I don't think the robots are really at fault, but it's just that the kind of businesses that would use the robots in the first place would also not spend the time making good fermented dough, not use the best ovens or the best quality ingredients because they want to make a quick buck in shopping malls or train stations with the good stuff, a good robot would make brilliant pizza

everyday7732

Food production lines have been built to standardise everything so that (for example) the dough is all the same consistency so it all behaves the same way and squishes into the same size circle when you flatten it. It seems like humans deal with inconsistencies way better than simple mechanical systems, but I wonder how long it will be until we see robotic food systems which adapt to the specific food which they are making. Like noticing that this particular dough is squished oval or unevenly and adjusting the flattening process to correct it on the fly or adjusting the topping stage to work with an oval base instead of the round one. That will be the real change when it comes.

jimbob45

A local pizza place sells premade dough and toppings. We just order that and cook it ourselves. It’s not perfect but it’s exactly the way we want it and we get to bond over making it. If I’m going to blow pizza-level calories in a meal, I can’t imagine going back at this point.

operation_moose

I wonder how many compromises of quality go into a robotic pizza? You're not getting a robot to stretch out a 16" New York style crust; you might get it to crudely roll out a ball of dough into a thick disk. I'm sure there are certain toppings that are easy to lay out (sausage balls) and some that are difficult (onion slices) so those might get left off. At a certain point you're adapting a good pizza recipe into a pizza that can be made by a robot, and at that point you're basically just making a frozen pizza on-the-spot and charging a lot for it.

zarzavat

It's easy to automate making shitty pizzas (Pizza Hut, etc), but real pizzas require quite some dexterity and it seems it would be difficult to automate. Perhaps start with burgers, that would be easier.

amelius

They should have a look inside a dr Oetker factory.

thrownawaysz

I've had my fair share of shitty human made pizza so this kind of sounds like the autonomous taxi news cycle to me Thousands of car crashes a day > not a news A Waymo crashed > national news Humans making shitty pizza is not a news. But robots burning a pizza is a news. It'll get better.

CrzyLngPwd

"I'll have no soul on mine please" :-) Food should be prepared with love. From when the seeds are sown, to when it's arranged on the plate.

kotaKat

It seems like the companies building it all put it into place then go "Ah, crap, now we have to deal with the part of the product lifecycle where it's actually being used" then suddenly cut rope and run after installing in hundreds of customers at once instead of dealing with their piling up queue of service issues. At least the pizza vending machines still seem to be working fine. And at the end of the day: we have frozen food vending machines that automatically re-microwave crap in them, so there's not real much left on that front to innovate.

delis-thumbs-7e

I had Pazzi-robot made pizza next to Pompidou in Paris few years back (it is not there anymore, case anyone wonders). I found it fun to watch the arms flip the dough behind the glass and the pizza tasted… Good, actually. Obviously pretty basic, but a lot better than your average fast food pizza-like garbage. Is it equal to good Italian trattoria or Pizzeria da Michele in Napoli, well oviously not. But for the price and speed and, well, hygiene, it was pretty ok. However, the economics of the place are what I questioned even then. Would I go there for any reason except curiosity? No, not really, I prefer to have a pizza date in a real restaurant. Also those robots cost according to the article upwards of $100k, to which you must add power and maintenance, you can hire quite a few pizza chefs with that money. So not only it need to be faster and better than your average pizza baker - the most time of making the pizza is the time it spents in the oven, which is also critical - it needs to brimg in crowds as well in order to be profitable. So yet again this seems to me a dumb way to use automation and robotics. Either you have to make those robots out of cardboard and make them last forever, or the financials just do not even out and you just make average pizza at a huge loss. Just because you can automate somethong does not mean you should .

josefritzishere

Robots make shitty pizza because they can't care. Your moms cookies are always best for the same reason.

beej71

In Seattle airport there's one of those McDonald's that has you order from the touch-screen booth and then pick up at the counter. (Maybe they're all like that now?) Just so dystopian to my eye. It didn't help that I was reading Mona Lisa Overdrive at the time. :) I know fast food employees typically don't give a fuck (I was one way back) but there's always been something about a human being being there that I fundamentally appreciated about the experience. [Cue the Carl's Jr ordering scene in Idiocracy ] And that counts double for the food being made. I don't want to hang the soulless robot painting in my house; I don't want to consume the soulless robot food. Even the teen just aching to get through his shift can't avoid imparting humanity to their work. If the burger is off-kilter, a person did that, and that's different than when an unsensing, unfeeling bot does. [Cue the burger reveal scene from Falling Down ] But I'm old, so... you young whippersnappers and all that. Maybe it's different.

newsomix9xl

I read about a Japanese pizza maker: he went to Italy to study the craft masters, found the best flours and experimented with novel combinations, hand built a wood fire stove, and used choice produce and flawless execution to make world class pizza. For a robot pizza maker I'm guessing the back story is like this: entrepreneur who knows nothing about pizza decides paying minimum wage is a waste and opts to buy $160k in machinery to make mediocre pizza cheaper and faster.

conorcleary

soylent green, plus distributed ovens