Overcooked? Why robotic pizza makers are failing | Hacker News Reader

Overcooked? Why robotic pizza makers are failing

bbc.com

31 pointsvinni284 comments

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I've had my fair share of shitty human made pizza so this kind of sounds like the autonomous taxi news cycle to me

Thousands of car crashes a day > not a news

A Waymo crashed > national news

Humans making shitty pizza is not a news. But robots burning a pizza is a news. It'll get better.

Good old "It'll get better".

If there's financial incentive for it to, why wouldn't it?

The way I see it, the best way to serve is to remove all financial incentives.

My dream is a free of cost at the point of service Uber pool like service that takes you door to door in one of those Ford transit vans.

Over time, you learn patterns and put in mass public transit and the door to door vans then become door --> van --> public transit --> van --> door

At least that's my dream for the US where we are spread apart like this

We already have this in downtown Houston but you don't get a Transit van.

Instead it's a little battery-powered multi-passenger buggy, covered with ads and limited to downtown.

>door --> van --> public transit --> van --> door

Still works like this but once you take the train or bus outside of downtown, then you're back on your own for the "last miles" except for a few other non-contiguous neighborhoods where they are beginning to add additional cells of this limited-area connector service.

This has been willingly subsidized by the major businesses in each service area, so it is free to use on its own, once you get onto the regular public transit though, then normal fares apply there.

There’s physics for one. The dough takes the temperature and time it takes to bake in the oven, the rocket needs certain ampunt of propulsion to fly etc.

So, the "it'll get better" is the robot pizza learning.

There's no reason it won't improve because we know that there is actually a world in which amazing pizzas exist.

Teleporters seems a rather random comparison for the sibling reply

I talked about rockets, not ”teleporters”. I also let aside that these systems do not learn, let’s pretend they do. What will it improve in? What does it mean to ”improve”? Ask yourself, what makes the difference between an amazing pizza and kinda ok pizza? How do you quantify that? Is it a binary value the way a mathematic formula either works or doesn’t, or how code runs or does not? Or is it more like poetry? kinda hard to srite into code when something that is literally a matter of taste is ”good”.

Maybe it doesn’t really matter, Marinara is pretty easy to make, 5 ingredients in an oven. Can we improve upen speed, like they say on the article? Up to a point yes, but there’s a bottleneck, the dough itself. It takes certain amount of time to make it into a oval shape, you can’t go too fast, since you break it. And then it has to be in the oven a certain amount of time, no matter what. That has nothing to do with automation, but the physical facts of the matter itself.

Now you have an average pizza that cost a fortune to make, but we accomplished it slightly faster than $10/h pizza chef. You see why those startups all fold?

What makes an amazing coffee?

That's a truly dialled in experience based on many iterations and fine control of input factors.

That's the parallel I'm envisaging.

Robo pizza doesn't need to mean 30 second pizza.

Just a perfect pizza at the end of the process with no humans involved.

I see that as infinitely achievable.

There's a financial incentive to invent teleporters, and yet...

Some of the greatest breakthroughs are when there is no financial incentive, or when unbridled ambition outperforms sometimes very significant runs for the cash.

Because some startup that's managed to cobble together a pizza-extruding machine that works when 20 technicians are standing around it carefully watching is not something whose future success you want to bet your business on?

Read the actual article. The robots are not burning pizzas and the article claims no such thing.

Most pizza made today are robot made in factories, it has been the case for decades. Shit-tier pizzas and didn't improve over time.

Not sure if that's true, there's some frozen supermarket pizza now that's seriously good. If I ordered fast food and they delivered a freshly baked Crosta Mollica pizza I wouldn't send it back. Of course a fresh pizza is better, but imo you couldn't get a Crosta Mollica quality frozen pizza 10 years ago.

Perhaps MSG. Seems to have been proven harmless, but leads to overeating, in my case.I"m not giving it up, I can't eat veggies without it :)

Guys look! An American up there

Are you talking about frozen pizza? That's always rather disappointing. Even chains like Dominos let alone good local pizzerias make their pizzas to order by people.

Those factories still have people stretching dough, while the bases travel along a big belt, because human hands are good for that task, and are widely available and easily repaired or replaced, and adapt to different shapes and sizes of product and other contingencies.

Machine rolled and cut: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=j1-2gdkOe3A&t=1m16s

No way is a person doing it for mass production.

People stretch dough, as I said, in factories, on production lines. This happens. Robots don't do this.

The pizzas I've been buying in Tesco are quite good really like this lot https://www.independent.co.uk/extras/indybest/food-drink/bes...

apparently they are "hand stretched" but I presume much of the other processes are automated in a factory. (prob not AI robots). A lot is about the quality of the ingredients. Those are wood fired and not frozen.

Tech firms bombard us with hype and publicity. Understandable, since they want to sell —- but this is the other side of the coin. If they want attention on their products they can’t expect it all to be good.

> Humans making shitty pizza is not a news.

If humans were making shitty pizza on average, these companies wouldn't be pouring in their dollars trying to imitate it.

>I've had my fair share of shitty human made pizza so this kind of sounds like the autonomous taxi news cycle to me

I think you need to check the definition of 'news'. Something that happens everyday isn't 'news'.

> If humans were making shitty pizza on average

I don't know about that. Shitty pizza sells very well. Nobody frequents fast-food pizza chains because of the quality of their pies...

> Shitty pizza sells very well.

I’ve heard they’re hurting nowadays because many of them outsourced delivery to Uber Eats/Doordash and are so fucking expensive now, you may as well go to a nicer pizza place.

I prefer when people employ their fellow neighbors and uplift their community with their enterprises.

This type of automation is inherently selfish and should be discouraged, im glad he lost 200k, that 200k could have been used to help employee a few college students who would go onto provide way more value to their community than a robot ever would.

Honestly if you see a company with robots like this, they hate their communities and are inherently selfish and greedy. Do not support them.

The article makes it sound like Lee Kindell is replacing himself, not employees: he "once made all his dough by hand – until an elbow tendon injury forced him to investigate using machines instead". Then he got two robots. But you might question why they had to be robots, that part is unexplained. Later on he suggests he can employ people serving the pizza instead and in this way get a higher pizza throughput. Though in fact his robots are broken due support vanishing vaporously so presumably at present he either does indeed employ some humans, or produces no pizza except imaginary future autonomous pizza, which is coming soon, just a matter of time.

Half baked product: https://weli.dev/blog/half-baked-product/

Nice little short story. Reminds me of Juicero, which has to be the flagship of this kind of product.

A surprising good read

Hey! This was good!

I wonder how many compromises of quality go into a robotic pizza?

You're not getting a robot to stretch out a 16" New York style crust; you might get it to crudely roll out a ball of dough into a thick disk. I'm sure there are certain toppings that are easy to lay out (sausage balls) and some that are difficult (onion slices) so those might get left off.

At a certain point you're adapting a good pizza recipe into a pizza that can be made by a robot, and at that point you're basically just making a frozen pizza on-the-spot and charging a lot for it.

I don't think any compromises are required. The quality of a pizza mostly comes from the quality of the ingredients and a pizza is otherwise simple to make and bake. Yes I am sure that some toppings are more difficult than others but that is really the key problem to be solved by any robotic pizza makers. If some toppings are current too hard and left off then that's a compromise on choice.

Rolling a thin base feels like an easy problem to solve. The question is whether rolling affects the base negatively compared to stretching.

And the answer is yes for specific pizza styles

Negatively enough that a consumer might notice? Baring in mind we are talking about fastfood here. Not artisan/ restaurant quality food.

Genuine question because I’ve never made my own pizza base before so I have no frame of reference here.

By the way, which pizza styles were you referring to?

Specialized machines can absolutely do a fantastic dough kneeding and rolling process, and spreading ingredients is also trivial with the right tools.

Pizza dough is usually not rolled, it's stretched. If you roll it then you will press out the air bubbles which makes the final crust denser. That's not always a bad thing and some pizza makers do swear by rolling, but it does mean you end up with a different pizza than an average human would make.

A specialized machine for stretching isn't that hard either.

> Many people enjoy hand-crafted pizza, though, I suggest. Doesn't a machine making your dinner take away the human connection we might otherwise feel with food? "

Not just pizza/food ...but this applies to emails and written documents now.

"I have really enjoyed that hand-crafted email" is not something you hear from actual people in real life.

I am saying this non-ironically as I understand what you are talking about, but very few people are geeky about how the document or email is written and thought out. Which is the whole reason we see these insane adoption levels of AI slop documents and emails nowadays.

My posts are organic but they are not vegan.

There are certain types of communication where I do appreciate the time and effort that someone has gone into producing it. These are not typically 'status updates' but when we are exploring the surface of a problem or opportunity and there is certain nuance in the decision making process that might follow.

I have heard multiple people say almost that exact sentence unironically.

Over the past months I myself have said that sentence unironically!

That sentiment is very old. 270 years “I apologize for such a long letter - I didn't have time to write a short one” old.

I think these days sending an actual handwritten letter with adequate penmanship would have a substantial impact.

(of course if this became popular there would be a service in China you could outsource it to. Probably already is for hanzi)

People may not say that, but they are more likely to read the hand-crafted email over the LLM-generated one.

You better appreciate a hand-crafted email from a service tech. Might save you anything from tens of thousands of euros/dollars in real money.

There are cultures (basically whole South Europe for example) where relation with food and its preparation is something personal, to share with friends and family and preparation is highly social event... something not so common in US I think (definitely not in eastern Europe that I can attest). QoL item for sure, but its impact highly subjective.

I can do for example pizza tasting on par with best restaurants out there. I don't do the best dough, but I can do toppings no restaurant can/does offer - ie various old aged cheeses like AOP gruyere, old dutch gouda, aged cheddar, italian ones, mixed with truffles or black garlic and so on. Better olives than restaurants use. Ham I know source of, not cheapest questionable crap from warehouse. Spices & herbs mix that is again not used in restaurants.

Just a footnote - its very different product compared to typical US 'pizza', in some cases I would call those cakes (ie Chicago style, pizza-inspired cake), but above is still valid.

> something not so common in US I think

Not as common as many places in the world, but it's also not rare. How true it is in the US depends a lot on where in the US you are.

I don't think the robots are really at fault, but it's just that the kind of businesses that would use the robots in the first place would also not spend the time making good fermented dough, not use the best ovens or the best quality ingredients because they want to make a quick buck in shopping malls or train stations

with the good stuff, a good robot would make brilliant pizza

Food production lines have been built to standardise everything so that (for example) the dough is all the same consistency so it all behaves the same way and squishes into the same size circle when you flatten it.

It seems like humans deal with inconsistencies way better than simple mechanical systems, but I wonder how long it will be until we see robotic food systems which adapt to the specific food which they are making. Like noticing that this particular dough is squished oval or unevenly and adjusting the flattening process to correct it on the fly or adjusting the topping stage to work with an oval base instead of the round one. That will be the real change when it comes.

Most frozen pizza crusts aren't even squished flat, its a large continuous sheet of dough which gets circles stamped out of it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1-2gdkOe3A

The waste gets cycled back through.

I doubt it will ever come.It would be waaaay to expensive.

It's easy to automate making shitty pizzas (Pizza Hut, etc), but real pizzas require quite some dexterity and it seems it would be difficult to automate. Perhaps start with burgers, that would be easier.

I read about a Japanese pizza maker: he went to Italy to study the craft masters, found the best flours and experimented with novel combinations, hand built a wood fire stove, and used choice produce and flawless execution to make world class pizza.

For a robot pizza maker I'm guessing the back story is like this: entrepreneur who knows nothing about pizza decides paying minimum wage is a waste and opts to buy $160k in machinery to make mediocre pizza cheaper and faster.

Susumu Kakinuma is the guy and Serinkan is the restaurant. About as good as it gets.

No doubt. What's the plans to add robots to his setup? My guess: none.

A local pizza place sells premade dough and toppings. We just order that and cook it ourselves. It’s not perfect but it’s exactly the way we want it and we get to bond over making it. If I’m going to blow pizza-level calories in a meal, I can’t imagine going back at this point.

Good pizza is all about having a good hot oven. Without it I see no benefit of using these fresh ingredients vs frozen pizza.

"Making" the pizza with a premade dough and pre-cut toppings is just a 1 minute operation to spread sauce and throw some toppings on it isn't it? Not much bonding there in my eyes...

> "Making" the pizza with a premade dough and pre-cut toppings is just a 1 minute operation to spread sauce and throw some toppings on it isn't it? Not much bonding there in my eyes.

I bet you’re fun at parties!

If you meant this ironically you would be spot on ;)

Dunno about the frozen pizza where you live, but where I live they are not much above "cardboard with some cheese on top" (except for some expensive brands).

Sure your homemade pizza improves significantly when you can get your oven very hot and cook it really quick, but homemade pizza from a conventional oven (250C or so), using your own dough and toppings is still miles better than frozen.

Not everybody has such... low effort palate so to say. Its not easy to have it once one tasted some properly well made food.

Don't do to France or Italy is my recommendation in all honesty, ignorance is a bliss.

What? Pizza is simple dough and cut veggies, maybe meat stripes and some grated cheese. If you think this is something that resembles a dish where you can taste if the maker is a good cook I really have a different view on food compared to you.

Freezing ingredients doesn't really make them taste super different on a pizza to me. Sure if you buy a cardboard cheap frozen pizza there is not much dough and toppings, but if you take the one that comes close to what you would pay in a restaurant it's not much different in my view.

I also think comparing the quality of cooking of Italy with France is unfair. Italy seems to have a way more basic cooking style.

Protip: break the lock off of your oven and put it on cleaning mode to reach sufficiently high temperatures...or just accept that homemade pizza will taste a little different than restaurant-bought.

It's not that tough to make pizza dough and that's usually where kids have the most fun.

It does however have a lead time of a day.

It's interesting to see how many breakpoints there are on "partially prepared" food though, like the meal kits vs the old cake-in-a-box etc.

It'll rise in 6 hours if you leave it out of a fridge.

It seems like the companies building it all put it into place then go "Ah, crap, now we have to deal with the part of the product lifecycle where it's actually being used" then suddenly cut rope and run after installing in hundreds of customers at once instead of dealing with their piling up queue of service issues.

At least the pizza vending machines still seem to be working fine.

And at the end of the day: we have frozen food vending machines that automatically re-microwave crap in them, so there's not real much left on that front to innovate.

"I'll have no soul on mine please" :-)

Food should be prepared with love. From when the seeds are sown, to when it's arranged on the plate.

Are not our robots yet capable of love?

PS. Being purposefully contentious here :)

Then good luck surviving in our current food system

I don't, I grow most of my own food, buy from local farmers, and cook all of my own meals from plain ingredients.

A lot of love goes into my food.

My mom's from a third world country and food is literally her way of showing love and yea i dunno i find robotics interesting but i find myself pretty unamused at a lot of automation attempts in the world that just carry this thick undertone of "fuck people", especially when the chances of UBI are virtually zero in The Default Country.

Just feels kinda gross for people to champion the "Doubt all you want but the tech will get better" when a lot of people who don't deserve to be screwed are literally going to be screwed when that day comes. Even with Waymo, like yeah. Cool, car drives itself don't have to talk to a driver sure great. I personally don't feel like it's worth displacing an entire industry of people who don't have other jobs to go to, but some people love to not think about that stuff because futurism. If I call a lyft/uber like both of those aren't my favorite companies at all but I understand the position people are in that work these jobs and it's not a perfect arrangement but I summon them anyways and always treat my driver well and tip well.

The _only_ robotics I'd be in here championing "haters gonna hate, itll get better you just wait and see!" is laundry folding machines. I'm annoyed that we're draining lakes over AI, throwing darts on dartboards of low paying wage jobs and spending millions on building robot automation to get rid of them, instead of perfecting the at-home laundry folding machine. Why can't that just be like a global race man I hate folding laundry.

For me, I'd want to see agricultural stoop labour automated away. It is literally back-breaking and therefore often done by temporary or illegal immigrants who can be abused without legal recourse.

> Food should be prepared with love

You forgot about the sentient non-veg elements that also get added to it. Is that done with love too?

They should have a look inside a dr Oetker factory.

I had Pazzi-robot made pizza next to Pompidou in Paris few years back (it is not there anymore, case anyone wonders). I found it fun to watch the arms flip the dough behind the glass and the pizza tasted… Good, actually. Obviously pretty basic, but a lot better than your average fast food pizza-like garbage. Is it equal to good Italian trattoria or Pizzeria da Michele in Napoli, well oviously not. But for the price and speed and, well, hygiene, it was pretty ok.

However, the economics of the place are what I questioned even then. Would I go there for any reason except curiosity? No, not really, I prefer to have a pizza date in a real restaurant. Also those robots cost according to the article upwards of $100k, to which you must add power and maintenance, you can hire quite a few pizza chefs with that money. So not only it need to be faster and better than your average pizza baker - the most time of making the pizza is the time it spents in the oven, which is also critical - it needs to brimg in crowds as well in order to be profitable.

So yet again this seems to me a dumb way to use automation and robotics. Either you have to make those robots out of cardboard and make them last forever, or the financials just do not even out and you just make average pizza at a huge loss. Just because you can automate somethong does not mean you should.

In Seattle airport there's one of those McDonald's that has you order from the touch-screen booth and then pick up at the counter. (Maybe they're all like that now?) Just so dystopian to my eye. It didn't help that I was reading Mona Lisa Overdrive at the time. :)

I know fast food employees typically don't give a fuck (I was one way back) but there's always been something about a human being being there that I fundamentally appreciated about the experience.

[Cue the Carl's Jr ordering scene in Idiocracy]

And that counts double for the food being made. I don't want to hang the soulless robot painting in my house; I don't want to consume the soulless robot food. Even the teen just aching to get through his shift can't avoid imparting humanity to their work. If the burger is off-kilter, a person did that, and that's different than when an unsensing, unfeeling bot does.

[Cue the burger reveal scene from Falling Down]

But I'm old, so... you young whippersnappers and all that. Maybe it's different.

soylent green, plus distributed ovens

Robots make shitty pizza because they can't care. Your moms cookies are always best for the same reason.

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