http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-24/inside-silicon-valley-s-robot-pizzeria
Interesting that they (robot makers) are thinking in terms of opening their own pizza places rather than selling the technology to the existing players. Seems kind of dumb to me since they will have to add several areas of competence to their existing expertise… and they are areas with zero synergies: managing employees (they have to have people to “decorate the pizza”), pizza marketing, leasing.
The robot seems nifty but the only savings I am seeing on that side is half a make-line employee since someone still has to set up the doughball and people are still “decorating” the pizza. If they can get to the point where the robot does more than sauce and the kitchen labor can be more significantly cut perhaps this will make more sense?
The delivery truck with the programmed ovens is pretty cool though. I could see something like that delivering a really fresh pizza and speeding up delivery times. Really cool… but again, something better sold to the bigger operators than trying to open 1000s of pizza stores in order to capitalize on.