Executive Chef Taylor Park stands in front of the Picnic intelligent food assembly platform with pizzas in foreground. Picnic announced its partnership with Centerplate at Seattle’s T-Mobile Park and the launch of its food assembly platform which enables high-volume, consistent, customizable pizzas and access to operational back-end data for food service providers.
An expert in making pizza could probably make a pie in a relatively short amount of time, but if you’re trying to cater to the masses, then even an expert will probably struggle, especially in terms of consistency. This is where robots can come in handy and the folks at Picnic are showing what the future of pizza-making could look like.
The company has brought its pizza-making robot to CES 2020 where they are actually putting it to good use by feeding attendees. This won’t just be a machine that churns out pizza, but it also has the ability to make adjustments and corrections by using a vision system that can read the size and shape of a dough, made by humans, and make adjustments to it.
It will then move the dough along a conveyor belt system where it will dispense pizza toppings and ingredients such as sauce and cheese as it moves. It will then put the pizza in an oven where it is then baked to completion.
According to Clayton Wood, CEO of Picnic, “Picnic’s distinct culmination of food production customization and throughput, smart data and cloud analytics is quickly resonating with food service operators.” Picnic is hoping that companies will adopt its machines where they will only require restaurants to pay a monthly fee with no money upfront.