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Comment by LeanderK | Hacker News Reader

I feel a bit stupid, but does the product look really bad? Why are they hyping it? I thought it would compete with restaurants, but it really looks like a frozen pizza. Weird distribution of ingredients, weird dough without a real crust and not properly baked (compared to for example a pizza baked in real a wood oven or from from a electrical pizza oven). It certainly doesn't look like a normal pizza.

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You touched on a pretty good point there. It's highly likely that this startup just reinvented the wheel, and people like DiGiorno already operate a superior version of this machine.

I suspect a frozen pizza factory machine is too large and sophisticated for this market. You can't fit it into a McDonalds-sized space.

If the output is frozen pizza quality, wouldn't it be cheaper to just buy frozen pizzas directly from the pizza factory, and then install ovens instead of a full pizza making machine?

Even though it looks the same, it probably won't taste the same. A lot of the issue with frozen pizza is that it is frozen, which means the ingredients are not fresh. These ones could theoretically have fresher ingredients. That will matter a lot when it comes to the dough.

I mean if the ingredients are brought directly from the farm to the factory, put on dough, and frozen. The only difference would be the dough.

The actual ingredients may be more fresh than if a random pizza joint bought them from a grocery store that picked them too early, shipped them half way across the planet, let them ripen in the back, brought them out, got bought a day later, left them hanging around for 5 days at the pizza store fridge before cutting them and putting them on your pizza 8 hours later.

If you are going to make a decent pizza, you are going to need proper dough, not a preformed crust. The dough will need to be worked and tossed or rolled out. The time it takes to put on sauce cheese and toppings is inconsequential wrt the time it takes to work the dough.

That's one of the largest misconceptions about what makes good pizza.

Yes, good quality toppings are necessary.

But what really sets pizzas apart is the crust. You _must_ have a good quality crust.

Unfortunately... it's the crust that most cheap and/or frozen pizzas skimp on.

I remember seeing several videos from different companies with their own version of a "pizza robot". Just look at this ad for a pizza vending machine from 2012 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pyrav_9Pbsc

That vending machine pizza maker doesn't get it right either. It mixes the dough "fresh"... but that's actually not ideal. The dough needs time to absorb all the water and time to sit out and be proofed before made into pizza.

Pizza seems simple... until you want something that tastes really good...

I am with you. I cannot for the life of me imagine who would want this machine. Companies that mass produce frozen pizzas have industrial processes that would put this gizmo to shame in terms of consistency and output volume. For restaurants, this machine looks like it would require so much maintenance to keep it working and sufficiently sanitary for use in a commercial kitchen that I am not even sure that it would offer any labor savings over a traditional pizza operation, and that is before you consider the fact that those pizzas look completely unappetizing.

Looks like pretty standard "cafeteria pizza" (non-rectangular division)

Yeah, that’s a terrible looking pizza, weird they would publicly demo it with that thing as the product.

Yeah, but presumably it's cheaper, so Gresham's Law of Pizza demands that the better-looking pizza become obsolete.

The picture is frozen dough and an electric oven. Presumably they'd use better dough in a real restaurant.

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