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Comment by nkoren | Hacker News Reader

Nit: unless the video is running at a reduced speed, the claim is false. You can clearly see that the pizza takes 18 seconds to pass over a single location. If you were to run then pizzas through edge-to-edge, then the fastest production rate would be (3,600 seconds per hour) / 18 seconds = 200 pizzas per hour. But that would risk having the dough from one pizza get stuck to the dough of the next. Adding a sensible 2 second gap between each pizza would reduce the throughput to 150 pizzas per hour.

Also, that sauce depositing methodology is just not right. This robot does it much better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=11&v=cc-ClpymK_Q

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The Zume pizza robot is way overengineered. The Costco one is significantly simpler:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8Q0vk_fKDEo

simpler, but way too much sauce

> simpler, but way too much sauce

That's a bit subjective. I, personally, like a very saucy pizza!

Depends on the style, the consistency of the sauce, and the dough, how much you can get use without making a mess. That looks way on the high side to me, though their sauce might be very dry (thick) which might let them get away with it.

Normally on my thin-crust pizzas with a somewhat watery sauce (what you get when you use fresh tomatoes, or canned crushed tomatoes, or anything along those lines without mixing it with lots of paste) you can see about 50% of the dough through the sauce, it's that thin, but if I make it much thicker the toppings get very... slippy-slidey.

surely it has an adjustable valve. They just decided that was the amount of sauce they wanted.

It would have to vary the sauce flow rate (or pizza spin rate) to get even coverage

the (adjustable) valve would adjust the flow rate of the sauce.

Making them round is so inefficient for the machines. Make 'em long -- that way you merely need to pass dough through a conveyor. Then, use the money you saved on the simpler machinery to do an advertizing campaign to change the public's perception of what shape a pizza should be.

The boxes are already square. Two long rectangle pizzas in a box. As a bonus, it's easy to pack two DIFFERENT pizzas with different toppings into a mixed box, for group orders. And variety.

I'm with you on the love of square pizzas. You get about 12% more crust on a square pizza versus circular (for the same area.) But unlike circular pizzas, a square pizza gives you at least 3 different crust configurations for different "kinds" of slices in the box. So both those who want more and less crust ratio can be satisfied.

Actually, in Italy the style of pizza people eat most is baked as a big square piece and cut into rectangles. These are typically eaten at lunch, not dinner. Italians don't really eat pizza at dinner (as I've been told by an Italian colleague).

As for the pizza in the machine video: it looks downright horrible, and only acceptable when compared to what goes for the average 'US-style pizza'. I'd much rather eat a frozen pizza from the supermarket, or something else entirely. Don't see the point of have 'more customization options' compared to a frozen pizza created in a factory, if the quality threshold of the pizza is so low in the first place. But maybe I'm just being a food snob ;-P

Detroit-style and some others (I think there's a thin crust square shape that gets claimed by various other midwestern cities?) are already rectangular.

it's also somewhat popular in Italy (depends on region) as a take away snack:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizza_al_taglio

It's kind of a ridiculous metric anyway. There's probably only a handful of pizza shops in the world, at their peak times, that sell 300 pizzas an hour.

It also doesn't bake the pizzas. What would an oven look like that can bake 300 pizzas per hr? That's one every 12s.

I make lots of pizza for fun with some friends at hacker events. We've managed to do ~120 portions (not individual pizzas) an hour with an entry-level pizza oven (2 levels, 60x90cm² area), the kind you see at kebab shops, and the oven was quite far from being the limiting factor (rolling the dough is hard work). From a quick web search, conveyor ovens can do up to 150 pizzas per hour, and you can typically stack them three high. So shouldn't be a problem.

The trick is that pizza is baked at a very high temperature. Our oven goes up to 500°C (900°F). Baking time is 90s-2min if you put the pizza on the fire stones directly, or ~3mins if you use a screen (tray).

the faster the conveyer the longer the oven (most pizza chains have conveyer ovens)

Is this because they can't sell that much, or because they can't make that much?

I'm sure you could have said the same thing about cars before the production was heavily automated, or even cell phone manufacturers before they went all-out mass production.

i.e. if they can make more per hour, they'll sell more per hour.

If cars had to be made "fresh", I have a feeling you could say the same thing.

There's already robots that can make frozen pizza at thousands of pizzas per hour...

Festivals and conferences could definitely make use of that rate of production.

If I call up a pizza joint and they say it will take one hour to get my order to me, I might call someone else instead. Improving their throughput could absolutely generate more business.

Pizza shops are making >100 pizzas an hour where this would be a problem?

It also doesn't include the dough preparation or the cooking, although the latter can be done by connecting the output of this to the input of a conveyor oven.

Their website says 300 pizzas/hr for 12" pizzas and 180 pizzas/hr for 18". Maybe that's the 18"?

(Disclosure: My brother worked for this company for about a year.)

Perhaps it takes into account the % of pizzas which have a certain number of additional toppings. Presumably Margherita pizzas can take much less time?

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