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."
I'm not much of a pizza fan, but if I eat it it's got to be fresh. So I agree with your comments about cardboard-tasting frozen pizza. Except lots of people are buying and eating frozen pizza, based on the doubling and tripling of that section in all my local grocery stores' freezer sections over the last few years.
"fresh" pizza in 3 minutes when the ingredients have sat for week? Also, pizza takes 20 minutes to bake properly in a clay oven, not IR. This is disgusting.
It might work on college campus with the drunk college kids late at night who don't care what they eat or even compete with frozen pizzas, but come on, who actually eats a frozen or chain-store made pizza? None of this is pizza in the sense. Only a true hand-made pizza with fresh ingredients and baked properly is pizza, the rest are nothing more than cardboard with ketchup!
I agree this would be a killer app for college campuses but I hope they have a thorough maintenance schedule. Definitely not as clean of an environment inside compared to most vending machines especially if college students keep it running all night.
Really, good frozen pizza can be done much quiker, and it comes out quite good. The secret is that after the thawing and heating in the microwave oven, it has to have the bottom heated for a short while on an oild griddle surface. Just enough to brown the bottom a bit. The hard part is even defrosting and thawing in the microwave oven. That takes some effort. But the heating the bottom makes such a great improvement that it can't be left out.
So if somebody uses my idea they do need to give me credit for it. And some free pizza. Royalty payments are negotiable.
My thoughts exactly. You put one of these things in a dorm lobby, or better still, each dorm floor and you will make back your investment is a heartbeat. As long as it is maintained properly; i.e. refilled, cleaned, repaired, etc .on a regular basis, you will have a real winner. I have no idea as to the most popular pizzas but I suspect cheese, pepperoni and veggie pizzas are the most often purchased. At 2:00 A.M. in the morning with a mechanics final at 8:00, you can bet those all-nighters will at least investigate the possibilities. Also, how about laundry mats, hospital waiting rooms, bus stations, train stations? I can think of several places that would be good candidates for machines such as this. Any place where a person has to wait would be a great candidate. The only downer-we have such a lawless country there would be damage and repairs necessary so the selection of location would be critical to staying in business.
Excellent idea Dave! "Cook" it in the container the eggs are served in and used prepackaged whole eggs, egg whites or egg beaters. Santition issues always loom large but with good design it can be minimized. Fabulous! When do we start our market research?
@marty48: I agree; 2.5 minutes seems like a short time to make a pizza, but a long time to wait for a vending machine.
How about an omelete machine? You can cook scrambled eggs in the microwave in about a minute. Add some chopped vegetables, some cheese, and maybe some ham, and you've got yourself a meal.
I saw a similar machine called Wonder Pizza a few years ago. It was a somewhat sleeker looking and had a smaller footprint. We even were given sample freshly made pizzas to eat at a demo. The taste was about the same as a frozen pizza. Not especially good for bad but novelty of a hot fresh pizza in a couple of minutes was the concept. No match for a pizzeria pizza. Initial cost seemed high and there was no leasing arrangement. The company provided all raw ingredients weekly and maintained the machine for a fee. We liked the idea and planned to sell the pizza on at cost to employees. Our management didn't go for it in the end. The biggest design problem was the preparation time. It's OK if one to three people queue up for pizza. The last person gets their pizza in 7.5 minutes later and that's acceptable in my opinion. When 5 or 10 people are queued up its a different story. I think name brand high quality frozen pizza kept in an appropriate storage/display unit with a nearby bank of specialized preprogrammed microwave (with browning elements or whatever) would cost the same and solve the production and wait time issue in the same footprint with a lower initial cost, much much lower maintenence fees, lower operating costs and equivalent food cost.
We just love vending machines. Look at the gumball and sticker machines.They exist for 50-80 years.Look at the success of Redbox! What was wrong with Blockbusters? I actually preferred Blockbusters.But we need vending machines.It is in genes.LOL. As far as pizza goes , unless you go to "classic" Italian run pizzerias in Chicago , or New York , you don't really know what a real pizza is. All the others are pretty much the same , although some have really nasty crust and sauces.Other than that there is not much to a pizza.I have many Italian friends, so there are no chances for me to taste a pizza from a new machine.I also have very serious doubts about hygene....but after seeing an inside of some food plants ,I think that this one can be cleaner.Let me know when you try it.
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