If you live in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, or anyplace else the minimum wage is $15 an hour, and work in kitchen prep, behold your future:
After three years of quietly toiling away on a robotic food system, Seattle startup Picnic has emerged from stealth mode with a system that assembles custom pizzas with little human intervention.
Picnic — previously known as Otto Robotics and Vivid Robotics — is the latest entrant in a cohort of startups and industry giants trying to find ways to automate restaurant kitchens in the face of slim margins and labor shortages.
Snip.
Picnic’s platform assembles up to 300 12-inch pizzas per hour, far faster than most restaurants would be able to make the dough, bake and serve the pizzas. That speed comes in handy in places where large numbers of orders come in during a rush, such as at a stadium or in large cafeterias. It’s also compact enough that it could theoretically be installed in a food truck.
Machines have been making frozen pizzas for years, but Picnic’s robot differs in a few respects. It’s small enough to fit in most restaurant kitchens, the recipes can be easily tweaked to suit the whims of the restaurants, and — most importantly — the ingredients are fresh….The robot is also highly customizable, comprised of a series of modules that dole out what
There is a catch: “The dough preparation, sauce making and baking — the real art of pizza — is left in the capable, five-fingered hands of people.” How long do you think it will take before that part is automated as well?
I don’t think it’s any accident this startup hails from Seattle.
I don’t know how it tastes, but I’d certainly be willing to give it a try.
As always, the true minimum wage is “Zero.”