Submitted by Gari_305 t3_xwcpz5 in Futurology
Comments
samcrut t1_ir6lg5d wrote
That's a stupid maintenance contract issue. They got duped into a service contract with Dave and Dave can only be in one place at a time.
I'm only half kidding. It's not quite that simple, but the real story is just as stupid and not that far off of this.
ill_Skillz t1_ir6wilb wrote
Not really stupid, more nefarious. McD corp makes money from the arrangement with the machine manufacturer, at the cost of the franchisees.
MilkshakeBoy78 t1_ir6naen wrote
mcdonalds does that on purpose to milk more money
samcrut t1_ir6ji9x wrote
"Cheese is 'the most expensive ingredient on the pizza' as well as 'the most overtopped,' with workers typically slapping on 40% too much — wasting money and glopping up the pies, Wood said."
Wood can just shut his damn pie hole. There's no such thing as too much cheese!
VitaminPb t1_ir7z6q1 wrote
“Hey, Jimmy, adjust the cheese amount slider down a bit! All the way to the left. Same with the pepperoni. These pizzas with six slices of pepperoni and two ounces of cheese aren’t making enough profit!”
Southern-Exercise t1_ira0dfr wrote
>Wood can just shut his damn pie hole. There's no such thing as too much cheese!
At a place I took over 20 or so years ago on base with pizza on the menu the area manager wanted me to fire and hire a whole new staff after I was there a short time because he thought they were stealing/giving away food due to food costs being double what they should have been.
I created a spreadsheet that mapped out the exact amount of ingredients we should have gone through for each menu item and manually entered 6 months or so of sales.
Turned out they used a few too many hamburgers and hotdogs (as in a handful total over those months) and exactly double the shredded cheese and French fries because of wrong sized portion baskets and eyeballing.
Something that was the previous managers fault, not the staff.
New containers and a pizza scale solved the problem and I had a very loyal staff as they eventually found out what almost happened.
So while I generally agree, sometimes there really is such a thing as too much cheese 😄
LeverLongEnough t1_ir5sjgo wrote
It’s interesting how many challenges this “easy” process still sees as it’s being designed. Quoted in the article, 30 former SpaceX engineers still find this work challenging.
To me this means probably what we already know; automation/robotics etc will favor the big players with lots of capital, and if you’re small your use-case needs to be narrow or laser-focused on one market/technology/process.
Especially for food automation it’s hard to completely remove human involvement, like for cleaning and managing restock of the machines. Still obviously major efficiency gains though.
One company I know of that wasn’t mentioned in the article is called Piestro, which is developing a pizza-making vending machine - the idea being that a pizza place could have their main restaurant and then operate a few satellite vending machines to service on a daily or almost daily basis.
CthuluTheGrand t1_ir698ds wrote
Probably very difficult to automate because cooking is so full of variables. Ingredients, even by the same brand, can differ massively. Like flour, eggs, yeast and the like can be quite different. Then specifically when it comes to baking the room temperature can affect the outcome a lot. Assume it's very hard to make the robot assess the probable outcome during the process to sufficiently tweak it enough to make the end product come out great. If a human pizza-baker starts pulling at the dough and notice that it's not as supple as it should be then heshe will tweak their handling of it or process it further. For a robot that would be quite difficult, not impossible but difficult.
n0oo7 t1_ir6u7z5 wrote
If we have a machine that can see green vs red tomatoes and kick the greens one out We can have a machine that can see how done a pizza is.
Downwhen t1_ir5xhod wrote
Yeah I was this close to investing a couple thousand into Piestro during their last crowdfunding round... I didn't pull the trigger though, will be interesting to see how far they go
MasonJack12 t1_ir8bomj wrote
I was going to comment the same thing. My big concern is maintenance and repairs. I owned a pizza truck with a mechanic impingement oven and those things were expensive to fix and it was hard to find qualified techs. Can only imagine what it will be like if a kiosk goes down thats new and proprietary.
DronesandBones t1_ir65lef wrote
My friend has been working at a pizza place for a while now. Maybe 10 years. Every time he asks for a raise and then leaves when he doesn’t get it. They call him a couple weeks later begging him to come back at the rate he wants. Because he’s a pizza master. On the surface level it’s a simple job but once you get into it there’s some skill and give-a-fuck that’s required. Especially with orders varying pretty wildly. Lots of variables to consider when making a good pizza.
bottomknifeprospect t1_iralha4 wrote
> "Nobody in food service has enough workers"
I wonder why..
[deleted] t1_ir6jqee wrote
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Illustrious-Minimum6 t1_ir9hrzk wrote
That's true, but only with the way the process is set up now.
The quality might be worse, there might be much less choice, the ingredients might be designed for the robot's process rather than taste, but there will probably be a market that'll be willing to trade quality for price.
And then the robots continue to get better, until they can handle more objects, more variations, and create better pizza.
And it'll probably never equal the quality that comes out of a pizza oven, but tbh people don't go to Dominoes for quality pizza anyway -- it'll be 'good enough'.
The pizza masters will probably get jobs at more expensive pizza places that charge a premium for a human having made it.
And eventually, the robots will probably be able to make better pizza than humans are capable of.
Especially because a lot of the quality of the pizza is the ingredients. For a set price point, a reduction in labour costs means more can be spent on ingredients.
Seeker_00860 t1_ir5tynq wrote
Looking for the day when robots end up eating the pizzas made by robots.
saffron_boy t1_ir5zdsf wrote
Zume pizza cries in its grave. Where all these stupid startups belong.
https://restaurantbusinessonline.com/technology/zume-shuts-down-its-robot-powered-pizza-business
Gari_305 OP t1_ir5o9g9 wrote
From the Article
>Artificial intelligence is taking the pizza business by storm, with a host of startups introducing machines that churn out pies faster and cheaper than humans.
>
>Why it matters: While robots are making steady inroads in the restaurant industry overall — flipping burgers, frying chips, brewing coffee — pizza is the place where automation may make its earliest and most transformative mark.
This raises an interesting question, with the advent of artificial intelligence in conjunction with robots, it'll be more likely than not that the Pizzas will have more consistency, and less variation, will it mean that Pizza makers will have more of an artistic quality since their numbers will eventually be reduced due to the influx of quality robots coming into the fast food scene?
vegivampTheElder t1_ir5p49k wrote
"human attendants sprinkle up to 40% too much cheese" - with that attitude they're not going to be taking over anytime soon.
Too much cheese. The absolute gall.
mrm00r3 t1_ir5sxqw wrote
It’s like Les Mis, only Javert is a roboticist.
latortillablanca t1_ir62zn8 wrote
They said it’s “glopping up the pies” as if that’s even a word or a negative.
Tom__mm t1_ir5wnnt wrote
Robots will be able to make whatever they are built to make, including excellent Neapolitans. But considering the huge numbers of people who love and consume really 4th rate pizza, the robots will only be as good as people’s taste.
geologean t1_ir70gtn wrote
This is kind of legit. AI is trained on existing data, and if the general preference is towards commercial, non-authentic pizza, then the training data will be skewed towards that kind of pizza.
mnamilt t1_ir5x2ba wrote
So why exactly is making a pizzarobot for a restaurant so hard, when its sort of a solved problem for frozen pizzas?
samcrut t1_ir6l1an wrote
Frozen pizza assembly lines make all the same pizzas. Different machines make cheese pizzas than supreme pizzas. The trick is custom builds. Half pepperoni and half veggie, or whatever.
mnamilt t1_ir6y1fj wrote
Intuitively it doesnt really make sense for me that the custom builds make it so much more difficult, but reality also shows that my intuition is clearly wrong lol. Thanks!
samcrut t1_ir7fgpu wrote
Also, they're not made one at a time. They're cranked out en masse. The reason Totino's went to square pizzas is they can feed dough into the machine and extrude a long crust banner, like a never-ending sheet of bread. That passes under the tomato sauce machine, then cheese, then other toppings and then they just cut the ribbon into squares with a single press. It's more like assembly line manufacturing than cooking.
mnamilt t1_ir7fz1u wrote
Ahh, that helps a lot to makes sense of it
Southern-Exercise t1_ira0trl wrote
The round pizzas tasted better and you'll never convince me otherwise.
samcrut t1_irbst0u wrote
There was a batch of them after they went square where something was different in the crust dough that made it taste, like, "Holy crap! THat's GOOD!" Like somebody sprinkled some ketamine in the dough or something. It wasn't really flavor, but something else. Like a mood booster was in it. Or maybe I had a small stroke while eating that particular pizza, but damn it was good. All 3 that I bought that time were like that, and then it was over. Now they're back to normal $1 pizza quality.
samcrut t1_ir6mlt2 wrote
I'm picturing an EV robot pizza van with a propane oven. You can roll out to where the action is and crank out pizzas that just slide the box out of a slot. Order online and QR scan to get your order. Maybe even delivery. Pizza assembled and cooked en route. My first thought was kinda like the old Fotomat booths. Just place your order online and drive up to the booth to pick up your pizza. Redbox of carb-loading.
FuturologyBot t1_ir5rww7 wrote
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305:
From the Article
>Artificial intelligence is taking the pizza business by storm, with a host of startups introducing machines that churn out pies faster and cheaper than humans.
>
>Why it matters: While robots are making steady inroads in the restaurant industry overall — flipping burgers, frying chips, brewing coffee — pizza is the place where automation may make its earliest and most transformative mark.
This raises an interesting question, with the advent of artificial intelligence in conjunction with robots, it'll be more likely than not that the Pizzas will have more consistency, and less variation, will it mean that Pizza makers will have more of an artistic quality since their numbers will eventually be reduced due to the influx of quality robots coming into the fast food scene?
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/xwcpz5/attack_of_the_pizzamaking_robots/ir5o9g9/
sergpepper t1_ir6vhj2 wrote
- we need a robot that will synthesize food and drinks like in Star Trek.
- We need an AI that will give a recipe to the robot chef according to my body mass index (diet).
[deleted] t1_ir73uq4 wrote
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[deleted] t1_ir7w44v wrote
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latortillablanca t1_ir63293 wrote
We’re about to enter the full on mr robot end times, but at least we will have a consistent pizza to nums on
Billzinga t1_ir6ac81 wrote
Find me two Mc Donald's within 20 miles of each other with a working ice cream machines and I'll start to worry about fastfood robots.