SEATTLE — If you love pizza, this may be the best-smelling office in Seattle.
"We are Picnic Works with our Seattle-based startup," said Scott Erickson, chief marketing officer for Picnic Works. "And we make robotic pizza assembly equipment for restaurants."
"You have a really hard time finding people to fill these open jobs. And so what we can do is automate part of the boring process, part of the repetitive pizza assembly portion. And then your employees are free to do other things that are of higher value, like serving customers or taking orders or making other types of recipes."
Though the pizza-making procedure is fully automated, it still begins with a human touch.
"There's an interface on the machine that has all of your recipes listed. And the operator can choose what size and what recipe they're going to be making,” Erickson said. "We put in any dough that you want, it can be whatever size, whatever shape, gluten-free, doesn't matter. And it starts to go down the conveyor, it starts putting on the sauce, and then cheese, and then freshly sliced pepperoni, and any other granular ingredients, like sausage or onions, and it comes out the end. And so the operator can then take it and either put it right in the oven or maybe put it in the fridge for later on."
"Our goal for what Picnic is, we don't want to just make a Picnic pizza, we want to make your pizza."
The machine can turn out 130 pizzas an hour with minimal wasting of ingredients.
"An average restaurant has about 10 to 12% waste, meaning that that food just goes in the garbage. With our machine, you're under 2%. So, it's very accurately placing the ingredients in the exact amounts that the chef wants."
The Picnic pizza stations are now used all around the country, and they recently completed testing in Germany for Dominos.
"We have people from engineering, from roboticists, from restaurant designers, pizza industry, folks who have all come together to build this. And so we're taking the expertise of all these types of people and we're building something that is 100% beneficial to restaurants from day one.”
So while helping food producers with their bottom line is serious business for the staff, building pizza-making machines can be seriously fun too.
"This is pizza. And this is robotic pizza," Erickson said. "I even have robotic pizza socks on right now because it's pretty, it's pretty fun."
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