I wonder how many compromises of quality go into a robotic pizza?
You're not getting a robot to stretch out a 16" New York style crust; you might get it to crudely roll out a ball of dough into a thick disk. I'm sure there are certain toppings that are easy to lay out (sausage balls) and some that are difficult (onion slices) so those might get left off.
At a certain point you're adapting a good pizza recipe into a pizza that can be made by a robot, and at that point you're basically just making a frozen pizza on-the-spot and charging a lot for it.
Pizza dough is usually not rolled, it's stretched. If you roll it then you will press out the air bubbles which makes the final crust denser. That's not always a bad thing and some pizza makers do swear by rolling, but it does mean you end up with a different pizza than an average human would make.
I don't think any compromises are required. The quality of a pizza mostly comes from the quality of the ingredients and is otherwise simple to make and bake. Yes I am sure that some toppings are more difficult than others but that is really the key problem to be solved by any robotic pizza makers. If some toppings are current too hard and left off then that's a compromise on choice.
> Many people enjoy hand-crafted pizza, though, I suggest. Doesn't a machine making your dinner take away the human connection we might otherwise feel with food? "
Not just pizza/food ...but this applies to emails and written documents now.
There are cultures (basically whole South Europe for example) where relation with food and its preparation is something personal, to share with friends and family and preparation is highly social event... something not so common in US I think (definitely not in eastern Europe that I can attest). QoL item for sure, but its impact highly subjective.
I can do for example pizza tasting on par with best restaurants out there. I don't do the best dough, but I can do toppings no restaurant can/does offer - ie various old aged cheeses like AOP gruyere, old dutch gouda, aged cheddar, italian ones, mixed with truffles or black garlic and so on. Better olives than restaurants use. Ham I know source of, not cheapest questionable crap from warehouse. Spices & herbs mix that is again not used in restaurants.
Just a footnote - its very different product compared to typical US 'pizza', in some cases I would call those cakes (ie Chicago style, pizza-inspired cake), but above is still valid.
"I have really enjoyed that hand-crafted email" is not something you hear from actual people in real life.
I am saying this non-ironically as I understand what you are talking about, but very few people are geeky about how the document or email is written and thought out. Which is the whole reason we see these insane adoption levels of AI slop documents and emails nowadays.
There are certain types of communication where I do appreciate the time and effort that someone has gone into producing it. These are not typically 'status updates' but when we are exploring the surface of a problem or opportunity and there is certain nuance in the decision making process that might follow.
Food production lines have been built to standardise everything so that (for example) the dough is all the same consistency so it all behaves the same way and squishes into the same size circle when you flatten it.
It seems like humans deal with inconsistencies way better than simple mechanical systems, but I wonder how long it will be until we see robotic food systems which adapt to the specific food which they are making. Like noticing that this particular dough is squished oval or unevenly and adjusting the flattening process to correct it on the fly or adjusting the topping stage to work with an oval base instead of the round one. That will be the real change when it comes.
It's easy to automate making shitty pizzas (Pizza Hut, etc), but real pizzas require quite some dexterity and it seems it would be difficult to automate. Perhaps start with burgers, that would be easier.
A local pizza place sells premade dough and toppings. We just order that and cook it ourselves. It’s not perfect but it’s exactly the way we want it and we get to bond over making it. If I’m going to blow pizza-level calories in a meal, I can’t imagine going back at this point.
Good pizza is all about having a good hot oven. Without it I see no benefit of using these fresh ingredients vs frozen pizza.
"Making" the pizza with a premade dough and pre-cut toppings is just a 1 minute operation to spread sauce and throw some toppings on it isn't it? Not much bonding there in my eyes...
Dunno about the frozen pizza where you live, but where I live they are not much above "cardboard with some cheese on top" (except for some expensive brands).
Sure your homemade pizza improves significantly when you can get your oven very hot and cook it really quick, but homemade pizza from a conventional oven (250C or so), using your own dough and toppings is still miles better than frozen.
> "Making" the pizza with a premade dough and pre-cut toppings is just a 1 minute operation to spread sauce and throw some toppings on it isn't it? Not much bonding there in my eyes.
I don't think the robots are really at fault, but it's just that the kind of businesses that would use the robots in the first place would also not spend the time making good fermented dough, not use the best ovens or the best quality ingredients because they want to make a quick buck in shopping malls or train stations
with the good stuff, a good robot would make brilliant pizza
It seems like the companies building it all put it into place then go "Ah, crap, now we have to deal with the part of the product lifecycle where it's actually being used" then suddenly cut rope and run after installing in hundreds of customers at once instead of dealing with their piling up queue of service issues.
At least the pizza vending machines still seem to be working fine.
And at the end of the day: we have frozen food vending machines that automatically re-microwave crap in them, so there's not real much left on that front to innovate.
I've had my fair share of shitty human made pizza so this kind of sounds like the autonomous taxi news cycle to me
Thousands of car crashes a day > not a news
A Waymo crashed > national news
Humans making shitty pizza is not a news. But robots burning a pizza is a news. It'll get better.
Most pizza made today are robot made in factories, it has been the case for decades. Shit-tier pizzas and didn't improve over time.
Read the actual article. The robots are not burning pizzas and the article claims no such thing.
Good old "It'll get better".
If there's financial incentive for it to, why wouldn't it?
The way I see it, the best way to serve is to remove all financial incentives.
My dream is a free of cost at the point of service Uber pool like service that takes you door to door in one of those Ford transit vans.
Over time, you learn patterns and put in mass public transit and the door to door vans then become door --> van --> public transit --> van --> door
At least that's my dream for the US where we are spread apart like this
I wonder how many compromises of quality go into a robotic pizza?
You're not getting a robot to stretch out a 16" New York style crust; you might get it to crudely roll out a ball of dough into a thick disk. I'm sure there are certain toppings that are easy to lay out (sausage balls) and some that are difficult (onion slices) so those might get left off.
At a certain point you're adapting a good pizza recipe into a pizza that can be made by a robot, and at that point you're basically just making a frozen pizza on-the-spot and charging a lot for it.
Specialized machines can absolutely do a fantastic dough kneeding and rolling process, and spreading ingredients is also trivial with the right tools.
Pizza dough is usually not rolled, it's stretched. If you roll it then you will press out the air bubbles which makes the final crust denser. That's not always a bad thing and some pizza makers do swear by rolling, but it does mean you end up with a different pizza than an average human would make.
Rolling a thin base feels like an easy problem to solve. The question is whether rolling affects the base negatively compared to stretching.
I don't think any compromises are required. The quality of a pizza mostly comes from the quality of the ingredients and is otherwise simple to make and bake. Yes I am sure that some toppings are more difficult than others but that is really the key problem to be solved by any robotic pizza makers. If some toppings are current too hard and left off then that's a compromise on choice.
Half baked product: https://weli.dev/blog/half-baked-product/
Nice little short story. Reminds me of Juicero, which has to be the flagship of this kind of product.
A surprising good read
"I'll have no soul on mine please" :-)
Food should be prepared with love. From when the seeds are sown, to when it's arranged on the plate.
Are not our robots yet capable of love?
PS. Being purposefully contentious here :)
Then good luck surviving in our current food system
> Many people enjoy hand-crafted pizza, though, I suggest. Doesn't a machine making your dinner take away the human connection we might otherwise feel with food? "
Not just pizza/food ...but this applies to emails and written documents now.
There are cultures (basically whole South Europe for example) where relation with food and its preparation is something personal, to share with friends and family and preparation is highly social event... something not so common in US I think (definitely not in eastern Europe that I can attest). QoL item for sure, but its impact highly subjective.
I can do for example pizza tasting on par with best restaurants out there. I don't do the best dough, but I can do toppings no restaurant can/does offer - ie various old aged cheeses like AOP gruyere, old dutch gouda, aged cheddar, italian ones, mixed with truffles or black garlic and so on. Better olives than restaurants use. Ham I know source of, not cheapest questionable crap from warehouse. Spices & herbs mix that is again not used in restaurants.
Just a footnote - its very different product compared to typical US 'pizza', in some cases I would call those cakes (ie Chicago style, pizza-inspired cake), but above is still valid.
"I have really enjoyed that hand-crafted email" is not something you hear from actual people in real life.
I am saying this non-ironically as I understand what you are talking about, but very few people are geeky about how the document or email is written and thought out. Which is the whole reason we see these insane adoption levels of AI slop documents and emails nowadays.
I think these days sending an actual handwritten letter with adequate penmanship would have a substantial impact.
(of course if this became popular there would be a service in China you could outsource it to. Probably already is for hanzi)
There are certain types of communication where I do appreciate the time and effort that someone has gone into producing it. These are not typically 'status updates' but when we are exploring the surface of a problem or opportunity and there is certain nuance in the decision making process that might follow.
My posts are organic but they are not vegan.
I have heard multiple people say almost that exact sentence unironically.
Over the past months I myself have said that sentence unironically!
That sentiment is very old. 270 years “I apologize for such a long letter - I didn't have time to write a short one” old.
Food production lines have been built to standardise everything so that (for example) the dough is all the same consistency so it all behaves the same way and squishes into the same size circle when you flatten it.
It seems like humans deal with inconsistencies way better than simple mechanical systems, but I wonder how long it will be until we see robotic food systems which adapt to the specific food which they are making. Like noticing that this particular dough is squished oval or unevenly and adjusting the flattening process to correct it on the fly or adjusting the topping stage to work with an oval base instead of the round one. That will be the real change when it comes.
Most frozen pizza crusts aren't even squished flat, its a large continuous sheet of dough which gets circles stamped out of it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1-2gdkOe3A
The waste gets cycled back through.
I doubt it will ever come.It would be waaaay to expensive.
It's easy to automate making shitty pizzas (Pizza Hut, etc), but real pizzas require quite some dexterity and it seems it would be difficult to automate. Perhaps start with burgers, that would be easier.
They should have a look inside a dr Oetker factory.
A local pizza place sells premade dough and toppings. We just order that and cook it ourselves. It’s not perfect but it’s exactly the way we want it and we get to bond over making it. If I’m going to blow pizza-level calories in a meal, I can’t imagine going back at this point.
Good pizza is all about having a good hot oven. Without it I see no benefit of using these fresh ingredients vs frozen pizza.
"Making" the pizza with a premade dough and pre-cut toppings is just a 1 minute operation to spread sauce and throw some toppings on it isn't it? Not much bonding there in my eyes...
Dunno about the frozen pizza where you live, but where I live they are not much above "cardboard with some cheese on top" (except for some expensive brands).
Sure your homemade pizza improves significantly when you can get your oven very hot and cook it really quick, but homemade pizza from a conventional oven (250C or so), using your own dough and toppings is still miles better than frozen.
> "Making" the pizza with a premade dough and pre-cut toppings is just a 1 minute operation to spread sauce and throw some toppings on it isn't it? Not much bonding there in my eyes.
I bet you’re fun at parties!
It's not that tough to make pizza dough and that's usually where kids have the most fun.
It does however have a lead time of a day.
It's interesting to see how many breakpoints there are on "partially prepared" food though, like the meal kits vs the old cake-in-a-box etc.
I don't think the robots are really at fault, but it's just that the kind of businesses that would use the robots in the first place would also not spend the time making good fermented dough, not use the best ovens or the best quality ingredients because they want to make a quick buck in shopping malls or train stations
with the good stuff, a good robot would make brilliant pizza
It seems like the companies building it all put it into place then go "Ah, crap, now we have to deal with the part of the product lifecycle where it's actually being used" then suddenly cut rope and run after installing in hundreds of customers at once instead of dealing with their piling up queue of service issues.
At least the pizza vending machines still seem to be working fine.
And at the end of the day: we have frozen food vending machines that automatically re-microwave crap in them, so there's not real much left on that front to innovate.
In rural France you can see pizza heating machines on the sides of some isolated roads.