Silicon Valley has a new vision for the pizzeria. It involves lots of robots
latimes.com
latimes.com
The pizzerias that are thriving right now are the ones making neapolitan style pizza in wood ovens, Pizza Hut and Little Caesars barely exist around here anymore.
Right now in NYC the going price for a Neopolitan-style Margherita pizza is something like $14. If you could get that down to even $8 for the same quality then that would be a huge win. Even if the robots couldn't make the dough, just getting them to the point where they can make the tomato sauce and put the sauce and cheese on the pizza and manage the cooking would be a substantial improvement.
And if they can get their costs down with automation I'm sure they'd find a way to make a profit in urban areas as well. After some time at the brewery, a $3.50 pizza is pretty attractive.
And in the next sentence, the quoted analyst says that automation can play into this trend by taking over repetitive tasks. In this case, it looks like you're getting more freshly hand-tossed crust and more freshly prepped ingredients than your typical chain.
I'm not that enthusiastic about the standard American pizza either, but as a popular way of feeding a family or group, it seems like an interesting target for automation. I agree that this is outrageously over-engineered - I imagine that this is a working prototype and that they hope to make a solution for a fraction of the cost and reproduce it across the country. This strikes me as a gamble, but not entirely crazy.
In my country a pizza made by hand cost US $ 3, an it is so big, delicious, cheap and fast.
Maybe big brands like Domino's, Pizza Hut, etc. will win reduce their cost, but as you say: "over-engineered solution".
There's an episode of How It's Made on Youtube on how supermarket / frozen pizza is made, very satisfying content.
Wasn't long before students saw how much there was to be made on a slice and that cheese is the most expensive part of the pie.
Personally, perhaps because of the population of Italian heritage near me, I simply avoid pizza places that seem like a business, not a life vocation.
I guess this would be attractive to Dominos or Pizza Hut.
$15 / hr minimum wage laws
We (society) are increasing the minimum wage with out figuring out what to do with all the unemployable people that do not have the education, experience, or in some cases the talent to command a wage that high. The belief is that companies will just "eat" the added costs because they are simply greedy today and can "afford" to pay more, these types of robots prove this will not be the result and what will be the result is massive unemployment
Massive unemployment for certain jobs is unavoidable at this point. Serves no purpose to condemn workers for several decades to survive with really low salaries. If there are greater efficiencies due to automation, everyone should be participating on the value created (insert basic income theories here or other similar policies)
As for the minimum wage... what can I say. Going to 15$ doesn't seem to be the end of the world. Adjusting for inflation, current minimum wage is really on lowest value for the decade and about median for the last 60 years. Considering how much economy has expanded in 60 years, seems like a very raw deal for workers in certain sectors.
Maybe the answer is that margins are so slim in the food business that any significant reduction in cost is bigger than it appears?
Seems so. We've got people saying labor is the biggest cost for a restaurant or pizzeria, but that necessitates asking: holy shit, how can the value-add of a fresh, hot pizza over its unprepared ingredients be so low that it's worth cutting wages to below $8/hour by robotizing the work? If pizza really takes that much value as input, why does it have so little value as output?
In a competitive market, it's always worth reducing the cost of inputs. The restaurant business is generally a competitive market (it's actually a bit worse than an ideal competitive market for participants, because there are usually lots of unsustainable competitors selling below cost and losing money.)
This sounds like the problem. Shouldn't the government do something about these anticompetitive practices? I don't think a good economy involves "charities" driving the restaurant business to extinction.
A somewhat common problem on Kitchen Nightmares was owners who didn't know how much they were spending on labor or food.
You mean, government should prevent owners from subsidizing operating costs as they try to establish and scale a business? Even if government wanted to do this in general (which would destroy Silicon Valley), how would it ever enforce it against millions of local small businesses, many of whom are doing it not out of deliberate strategy but simply out of lack of business skill?
And, more importantly, how do you do it without creating barriers to entry that are themselves anticompetitive in a way which is much more consumer hostile?
I can see quite a few places from pizza to fast food where a little automation could greatly improve the quality and consistency of food.
While traveling we hit a Pizza Hut. I hadn't been to one in years and wasn't expecting much. It was shockingly good. Fast forward a few days and we foolishly gambled again and they set a new bar for low. Same chain, same ingredients, same order - the only thing different were the people. If we can replicate the people who know how to make a good pizza and replace the ones who can't - I'm all for it.
Pizza factories make pizzas in batches, like 2000 times pizza Y. And they get frozen, no need for an oven.
Here you need to make X, Y and Z pizza for this order. Then just an X. Then 2 Y's and a Z. All need to be made from scratch and end up hot in a pizzabox. So quite different from the factory.
More like a white label offering. Which has lower margins, and requires the customers don't view their driver network as an asset.
After all, like Stephenson said, when you get down to it America really only does four things very well. Music, movies, microcode, and high-speed pizza delivery.
1. Only flour and water in the dough? What about yeast and salt?
2. Whenever I make pizza the dough is rather sticky. I wonder how they keep the parks from being clogged up by sticky dough.
As a complete aside, having tried both Italian pizza in Italy and americanized pizza I actually prefer American style with it's more cheese, more sauce, and diced meets instead of whole slices. But I'm sure it is also way more calories.
Could put the oven on the back of the delivery scooters they use around here for fresh-out-the-oven pizza.
A fresh pizza has qualities in the dough and especially in the meats that just don't carry over to a frozen pizza. One is a proper dinner, the other is a backup plan.
Technically, it sounds like it's a pain in the but.
How much better is a machine made pizza if it's not been frozen?