Fresh pizza may be coming to a vending machine near you. The Let's Pizza machine can do what no mechanized predecessor has done. It kneads and unrolls dough, stamps it flat, adds fresh ingredients, cooks, boxes, and delivers a pizza -- all in less than three minutes. Its distributor, A1 Concepts of the Netherlands, plans to put the machines in airports, malls, theme parks, and, yes, colleges.
"Everything about these pizzas is fresh," Ronald Rammers, CEO of A1 Concepts, told us. "There's a bag of flour, specially mixed, that comes straight from Italy. We combine it with fresh water, fresh sauce, and fresh toppings."
Click on the photo below for a Let's Pizza slideshow.
Let's Pizza vending machines will make their American debut in Atlanta in August. (Source: A1 Concepts)
The Italian inventor Claudio Torghele spent six years perfecting the mechanized vendor, with the idea that it would do more than simply zap a frozen pizza with microwaves. His machine mechanically mixes the dough from bags of water and flour and then passes it through a series of shaping and pre-heating stations that create a flattened and partially baked pizza base. A conveying tray moves the preheated crust beneath metering devices that squirt on the tomato sauce. Other distribution components add cheese, sausage, ham, and fresh vegetables. The machine then moves its product to an infrared oven for about a minute before putting it in a cardboard container and sliding it through a slot in the front of the machine.
Torghele told us he conjured up the idea while visiting California and seeing the emphasis on fast food. His vision originally called for a pasta machine. "After we started building it, we decided that pizza would be a more global product, so we changed it."
This one is real, GlennA -- at least in the sense that the machine exists. I can't speak for how palatable it is, though. We'll have to wait until it arrives in the U.S. to find that out.
For a late night college snack, I can very much envision this machine as a success in dormitories everywhere. Also airports, hospital waiting areas or anywhere you can't just pop out for a bite.
For college, an adjunct machine that verified age via a student ID card swipe and biometrics which dispensed beer would be a welcome addition for some. :-)
This is a great idea and application. I could see these being located next to the Redbox machines that seem to be in every shopping plaza all of a sudden. You could get a movie and a pizza any time you want.
really, this is the best thing ive heard about in a long time.
i do like the idea of a window so you can see it being made, though. about ten years ago, i was at a Kinko's that had a coffee vending machine. you selected what you wanted, and in a window, you saw it grind whole coffee beans, dump in onto a filter that was part of a large roll, and then hot water poured right through it into your cup at the bottom. i never would have known this thing was brewing fresh-gound coffee, id have guessed it was instant. it was totally worth it just for the experience, but it was good coffee tooo.
It's a pretty interesting machine and there are certainly some airports that I've been to where this would have been a great option. There seems to be a fair amount of waste, though, since each item is individually wrapped.
It would have been nice to see the cleaning and sanitizing cycle. That's probably more interesting than the pizza making cycle from the the engineers' stand point.
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