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".