Robot Pizza Company 'Zume' Wants To Be 'Amazon of Food' (bloomberg.com) 208
kheldan writes: Do you want robots making your pizza? Alex Garden, co-founder and executive chairman of Mountain View startup Zume, is betting you will. Garden, the former president of Zynga Studios, was previously a general manager of Microsoft's Xbox Live. Garden launched Zume in stealth mode last June, when he began quietly recruiting engineers under a pseudonym and building his patented trucks in an unmarked Mountain View garage. In September, he brought on Julia Collins, a 37-year-old restaurant veteran. She became chief executive officer and a co-founder. Collins was previously the vice president and CEO of Harlem Jazz Enterprises, the holding company for Minton's, a historic Harlem eatery. The company consists of an army of robot sauce-spreaders and trucks packed full of ovens. "In the back of Mountain View's newest pizzeria, Marta works tirelessly, spreading marinara sauce on uncooked pies. She doesn't complain, takes no breaks, and has never needed a sick day. She works for free." The pie then "travels on a conveyer belt to human employees who add cheese and toppings." From there, "The decorated pies are then scooped off the belt by a 5-foot tall grey automation, Bruno, who places each in a 850-degree oven. For now, the pizzas are fully cooked and delivered to customers in branded Fiats painted with slogans, including: 'You want a piece of this?' and 'Not part of the sharing economy.'" Garden says, "We are going to be the Amazon of food. [...] Just imagine Domino's without the labor component. You can start to see how incredibly profitable that can be."
wow (Score:5, Funny)
A former employee of Microsoft, makers of the Zune, names his company "Zume"? Don't strain your creativity muscle there, pal.
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Sootman: Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Oh hell no! That leads to the evil path of emojies and animated gifs. Oh hell no!
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Nah, I just want bold, ital, etc. No, definitely no GIFs.
They'll also need to remember to update their CSS so ULs and OLs work at all.
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Nah, I just want bold, ital, etc.
Yeah! The readership of slashdot is not anywhere near technologically savvy enough to have bold, italic, or other effects without a toolbar. Leave that coding stuff to the nerds.
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Really/? You can get bold and ital
Did you even look at the "Allowed HTML" below the Submit button?
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You can get bold and ital
You can even combine them, hey.
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Yeah, I have a few of the tier 2 guys send me ani-gifs in Sametime (part of the IBM Domino Notes package.) I'm sorry that you are stuck in ITIL hell, so am I. I have Messaging for a 100+ year old French company running 70 odd Domino servers. Oh, did I mention we also have to track out tickets and projects in kanban? I'm almost willing to learn Windows servers to get out of this! But the pay, bennies & commute are worth not having to drive into Seattle or Bellevue.
Re:wow (Score:4, Funny)
I just wonder why he wants to name his product after a product that is a well known train wreck. I mean, would you call your company Emron?
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It's brave of you to admit your shortcomings.
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"Zume" as in "fast going in and fast going out"?
Re: wow (Score:2)
Wait a minute... (Score:5, Insightful)
It says right there that humans add the cheese and other toppings. How is that "without a labor component"?
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The only robots mentioned spread the sauce and put it in the oven. Like you mention humans add the toppings. Nothing is mentioned about the dough so that's probably a person and the same thing about cutting the pizza after it's in the box.
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Good grief, spreading the sauce is by far the easiest task too - I really doubt they're saving much - if anything - over having a human doing that.
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Why can't the automation add toppings?
For some reason we like Papa Murphy's take-and-bake pizzas, and they weigh all the ingredients that go on the pizza. The only human aspect is nominally spreading the weighed amount sort of even, things I believe could be done pretty easily via automation.
I suppose there may be some ingredients more difficult to add via automation, but not many.
I don't want robots making my pizza (Score:3, Interesting)
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99% of the food you bring home was robot handled by the farmer, packer or entirely in the case of processed foods.
It's ok for robots to mix bags of salad, or to combine flour and salt to make bread in bulk...
i'd rather a consistent robot than angst filled teenager capable of manufacturing and distributing hair, mucus, saliva, blood, semen and other biological contaminants onto my pizza.
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If you actually eat real food instead of Cheetohs and diet root beer, that's simply not true. You gotta learn to cook, brother.
Re: I don't want robots making my pizza (Score:2)
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We're lucky we can afford not to buy most of our food from factory farms. I live in a place where there's good fresh produce and meat from small producers a short drive away. I've watched how our produce is picked, sorted and packaged, and it's not by robots.
And since we don't eat much in the way of processed foods like Cheetohs, no, our food is not mostly handled by robot.
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Factory farms are not the same as industrial slaughterhouses. And I am NOT ordinarily very sane and logical.
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Farm nerd!
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What is the point of having fiber internet if you can't shop for prostitutes on backpage.com or watch that dominos progress bar to see if your pizza will be delivered by a girl for once instead of yet another indian?
Netflix is cool but once you've reached the bottom like watching 17 seasons of Midsomer Murders it becomes useless.
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i'd rather a consistent robot than angst filled teenager capable of manufacturing and distributing hair, mucus, saliva, blood, semen and other biological contaminants onto my pizza.
An anonymous robot making and anonymous pizza for an annoymous coward - sorry friend it's going to be primed by an anonymous human. An anonymous pizza robot primer can jizz into the sauce container for the robot to maximize the distribution of semen over many pizzas. Coupled with some of foot shavings into the flour of the robot feeder and some urine into the water tank should encourage people to learn how to cook for themselves.
Once you learn how to cook for yourself you can appreciate that creativity and
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sometimes when you're not a pretentious cunt you just want decent food at a reasonable price quickly without requiring a lot of work.
What about the times when you're not a pretentious cunt, do you cook then? Or are you always a pretentious cunt?
some of us work hard and long hours so we can move out of our parents houses.
Well I can assure you that it is my kitchen, in my house, that I'm using. Perhaps if you didn't eat take away *all the time* you could afford your own house. The roast lamb with anchovies, garlic, roast potatoes, carrots brocconi cost me $20 to feed four people, plus myself left overs for the next day or so.
Don't underrate the time/money savings in preparing food yourself. Such a meal is an hour
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You want
decent food... reasonable price... quickly... without requiring a lot of work...
You get to pick any 3 of those. Choose wisely.
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Re:I don't want robots making my pizza (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't get a skilled human you get underpaid people who don't give a fuck about you or your pizza and are resentful to their employer.
who do you think makes pizza, graduates with a 3 year degree in pizza making? Trained chef's from italy? 3rd generation pizza makers with skills past down from their father and their father before him?
Re:I don't want robots making my pizza (Score:5, Funny)
"who do you think makes pizza, graduates with a 3 year degree in pizza making?"
Hell no, Art History Majors
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i guess the ones that aren't painting caricatures in tourist traps or talking to you about your long distance service
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Or being barristas
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Mochas in the morning, pizzas at night.
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Thanks! We try.
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that was obviously sarcasm it was clearly an error, i'm sure you've never hit submit on a typo before
Pizza and Hamburgers (Score:5, Interesting)
This makes the pizza and hamburger biz ripe for automation. I like what some blokes in Europe suggesting: Tax robots and spread the wealth. I don't know what else we'll do besides have a massive underclass of people without food security and absolutely nothing to lose. The cool thing is when this happens you get a high crime rate and then the ruling class gets to move hard right to crack down on all that crime, creating a self perpetuating system. I'm seeing this in Brazil, Venezuela and the Philippians and I figure the whole world is gonna go this route or else Scandinavian style socialism. I'm hoping for the latter but not betting on it.
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Don't have mod points right now, so here we go: Very insightful comment.
Really don't see an alternative to a basic minimal income in the future, it's either that or complete dystopia.
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"Really don't see an alternative to a basic minimal income in the future"
And I really don't get how this "basic minimal income" meme has come from, except there *is* a Protocols of the Elders of Zion-style plan for world domination. Nobody can really be that stupid as to think basic income is, at least on itself, anything but a very very bad idea for those hoping for it, which means there must be a really strong conspiration from those that will really benefit from it (those that already reached the 0,1% s
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Pizza and Hamburgers are popular fast food because there's very little actual skill involved in making it. It's bread and cheese and toppings. If your a restaurateur then you want to make food that doesn't need expensive labor so you can maximize profit and have employees that don't need a lot of training. Well trained employees have to be coddled because they've got options. This makes the pizza and hamburger biz ripe for automation.
Somehow, I can't connect the first thing you said to the last. If you have expensive, hard to replace workers that need coddling wouldn't they be the ones ripe for automation, all other things being equal? Robots are really good at three things, mass production, precision and consistency and food processing isn't the first one - then I'm thinking about making a million gadgets to ship in containers. If you just need to get it roughly right and failure is not a big deal - whoops we burned your pizza we'll ma
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The missing link in his argument is:
jobs that are easy to do will probably be easier (hence financially viable) to automate.
The truth of this is debatable, as sometimes an easy skill for a human is hard to automate, and sometimes a hard skill is easy to automate.
You are correct in your assertion that high skill staff would have a bigger payoff in automation - but again it all comes back to their pay vs the cost of R&D to automate. Your risotto example does sound like a prime candidate if the parameters
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Another aspect is that low skill jobs usually have a larger margin of error. This means that you can come to market sooner with an earlier prototype, and continue to refine once revenue starts coming in.
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I do about 90% of the cooking for my wife and me, so going to a restaurant gives me the evening off.
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Re:I don't want robots making my pizza (Score:5, Insightful)
Who the *$%* does this moron think he is?
Somebody who thinks human beings have a higher purpose in life than doing a robot's job badly?
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Who the *$%* does this moron think he is?
Somebody who thinks human beings have a higher purpose in life than doing a robot's job badly?
Which I agree with. Because I'm a marxist. Ownership of the means of and profits from production belong to the workers.
If you have that sort of resource (re) distribution than humans can pursue that higher purpose.
If you have the sort of exploitive capitalist oligarchy we currently have in America then automation produces an even larger class of even more contingent workers at the mercy of the predatory owners of capital. Tough to pursue your higher purpose when you're starving.
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Guevera is also a name. Maybe it's his real one.
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Ah, but the robots were designed and manufactured by human engineers. Shouldn't they perhaps be partners of the pizza chain, (kinda like Apple's 30% cut on all app sales)?
So like any other (frozen) pizza company? (Score:5, Interesting)
There are plenty of factories that make pizza's using robots, there is nothing new about that and there are a handful of companies that will sell you a custom 'robot' (or as they used to call it, a conveyor belt). Given the amount of time and money spent (employee cost, prototyping etc) reinventing the wheel, I'm not sure whether it would be a good investment to go into business with such morons.
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Yeah that was my reaction too. "Uhh... I don't think Tony's frozen pizzas are made by humans. "
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Hell, ever been to a Pizza Hut and looked in the back? The pizzas are mostly made by robots as well, the only thing the people on-site do is put special toppings on, but if you order a 'regular menu item', you're most likely getting a pizza out of a package. McDonalds and pretty much any fast food chain does it as well, after reading the article, $18 seems a bit pricey for a simple pizza.
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My friend owns a small pizza restaurant in Russia, and he keeps telling me that the great problem with pizzas is consistency. It's not hard to make dough and spread some sauce on it, but it's quite sensitive to small variations in the temperature and
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So you're moving the factory closer to home, there is a reason Domino's, Pizza Hut etc doesn't do that, mainly cost and scale.
The "robots" (or food processing conveyor systems as they are known) are easily obtained, a number of companies make them but they could make an entire day of pizza for an outlet in under an hour, it's more economical to have the place to make all your pizza's in a central location, ship it and have a $10/h monkey put it in the oven.
You don't have to freeze it, you could vacuum pack
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So you're moving the factory closer to home, there is a reason Domino's, Pizza Hut etc doesn't do that, mainly cost and scale.
Yes, and that's why it'll be tastier, and it won't cost that much extra. Cost of ingredients is really a red herring, unless you want pizza with exotic stuff. The main components of pizza are very cheap, even for high quality stuff.
Domino has to do serious penny-pinching, to make sure their pizzas are 10 cents cheaper than the pizzas next door. But there's a huge market of people (especially in affluent places like Mountain View) that are willing to pay extra couple of bucks for better quality pies, but w
Why? (Score:2)
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The board of directors is already controlled by an algorithm running on servers at JP Morgan or SilverLake. You think Tim Cook decides how many iPhones he has to sell in the next three months?
we're all variables in a sad little script written in APL
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"Why not automate the job of a CEO or Board of Directors, and fire them."
Because it is the CEO or the Board of Directors the one choosing who gets fired and who gets a bonus. Become a CEO and you will be totally free to fire yourself without bonuses or seven digit severance packages if so you want.
Easy, isn't it?
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Not having to pay a CEO or board members would provide a significant boost to shareholder value, no?
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C'mon, you can program a robot to take a golden parachute and bail when the shit hits the fan.
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And when has *anyone* been reassured by the CEO's speech during an "emergency meeting in the conference room"?
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It was quite reassuring for me usually. Reassuring that the decision to bail before the shit hits the fan was a good one, that is.
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Like Hurd, Zuckerberg, Ellison and host of others have any. They do have something soft, but it isn't people skills.
I fail to see the problem (Score:2)
CSB time. When I was 19 or so a friend worked in a pizza joint. Our trick was to call in a pizza that would be ready 5 minutes before closing (this was before pizza delivery, I'm old, deal with it), then not go pick it up. Mike would close th
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Except that all they have robots doing is the sauce and putting the pizza in the oven. Everything else is done by humans.
The Amazon of food, huh? (Score:2)
How hot will that pizza still be three days later when UPS drops it on my doorstep in Yavapai County, AZ?
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Where you getting your pizza now? Rosa's, Pisa Lisa's, Aroma or Crusty's?
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Famous Pizza. Occasionally Pisa Lisa.
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I guess the good thing about living down there is that when you order pizza delivery, it shows up on your doorstep at approximately the same temperature as when it came out of the oven no matter how long the trip takes.
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Right now, yes.
Imagine Domino's without the labor component? (Score:2)
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It's also amusing that he wants to "be the Amazon of food" and thinks that what he is doing will be incredibly profitable: Amazon is practically iconic for their absolutely tiny margins across most of their history an
The "Amazon of Food"? (Score:2)
What's new? Getting the wrong pizza way later than expected is something my current pizzeria can do just fine.
here's news for you bloomberg... (Score:4, Informative)
Pointless to make robot toppings (Score:2)
If you're in the business of making a pizza you will likely acquire the toppings, and cut them, e.g. cutting mushrooms to small pieces, or slicing that New York sausage-like thing named after bell peppers. I assume it's faster to then drop the toppings on the pizza rather than load them in an array of toppings dispensers and catter to that ugly, oversized machine.
Disgusting (Score:2)
We are going to be the Amazon of food. [...] Just imagine Domino's without the labor component.
I do not know about their pizzas, but at least their speech is disgusting.
Roses need bullshit. (Score:4, Interesting)
But in this case, the roses are covered in bullshit.
"She works for free."
No, "she" doesn't. Anyone who says a piece of equipment "works for free" even if it doesn't have an operator most of the time is /lying/. Maintenance and setup costs can be a bitch. If you believe that machines are "free labor," you have no experience in manufacturing. They amplify the ability to make stuff (scaling up is more economical), but they're not free.
The pie then "travels on a conveyor belt to human employees who add cheese and toppings.
So the only problem solved here was the simplest, spreading sauce. Frozen pizza companies have solved the issue of automation, but it doesn't scale down. I'll get to that in the last paragraphs.
Even the guy who tried making a burger-making-robot failed. It was basically a VC scam, which this sounds like.
>Zynga
Yeah... uh...
>end of article
>shells out for a hand-made pizza, because it's better.
But of course, because bespoke pizzas are easier to make when the maker can /adapt/, unlike a machine, which must be retooled. Frozen pizzas, made entirely under automation, are "standardized" per the manufacturer. And that's what happens when you automate something that's hand-made, choices get reduced to a handful. You're not going to see a pizza come from these trucks with soppressata, as 80 percent (or more) of people /don't even know what it is/.
I'm not saying this is impossible, but the fact is that a lot of people go to pizzerias because they can easily get special orders, because if you can't, frozen pizzas are less expensive and you don't have to leave home. Say what you will about cardboard and disappointment, but big pizza chains that rely on human help will still do special orders.
"Any color, as long as it's black." - H. Ford
--
BMO
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I'm not saying this is impossible, but the fact is that a lot of people go to pizzerias because they can easily get special orders, because if you can't, frozen pizzas are less expensive and you don't have to leave home. Say what you will about cardboard and disappointment, but big pizza chains that rely on human help will still do special orders.
Of all the times I've eaten big chain pizza, whether it's with work or friends or family I don't remember anyone ordering a special. At most I seem to remember ordering a half-and-half, extra cheese on the edge, sour cream or salsa dip and such but they're all minor variations where if you've made a robot to handle the 20 pizzas on the menu, you'll easily make the variations too. At most they have a "pick your own toppings" pizza where you essentially make a pizza just from "extra" toppings. Really you can
whoa 18 bucks? (Score:2)
If you buy in bulk or regularly, dominos can deliver pizza for $10 a pizza. We do it at work all the time.
$18 dollars is pretty pricey for one single pizza. If its made by robots, i want it to be CHEAPER than humans, otherwise whats the point?
I guess you dont have to tip them, so there's that.
Can't see the local shops using these (Score:2)
Maybe my local pizza shops are too small to use these but these robots use up way too much space for what they do. The robot that loads the pizza takes up a lot of floor space. And in the space for the robot to put the sauce on you could have a station that allows a person to make complete pizzas. Not every pizza shop is going to open up in a huge store. Real estate is a huge expense for them and they will want to minimize the amount of space they have to lease.
Thanks, but... (Score:2)
... I already eat pizzas made by robots.
http://imgur.com/5UUmFOz [imgur.com]
Also: "[the robot] works for free..." Oh really? It never needs electricity? Or parts?
This gets funnier each time I read it. (Score:5, Insightful)
"Just imagine Domino's..."
I'm not a big pizza snob, but even I think you're setting a pretty low bar there.
This will clearly be the future... (Score:2)
Frankly, in 50 years homes might not even be built with full kitchens anymore...
Why? Because it will become so cheap and so easy to have robots make quality food and deliver it, people just won't bother to cook anymore.
Some of you will laugh at that, and of course some people will keep full kitchens, but the space that they take up today might be cut in half for other uses once robot food delivery becomes normal.
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"it will become so cheap and so easy to have robots make quality food and deliver it, people just won't bother to cook anymore."
Exactly that.
And it'll come in the form of pills and they will be delivered by flying cars.
That's no news: we know that's happening since the 50's!
How does it taste? (Score:2)
So they want to be screwy with their own. (Score:2)
If they're trying to be the Amazon of something, they'll be screwy with the few humans involved in the process.
Who will REALLY be the Amazon of Food? (Score:3)
Amazon. Duh. https://fresh.amazon.com/ [amazon.com]
Re:Baking on the go (Score:4, Informative)
No that's the only range you can do in home ovens,
pizza ovens are MUCH hotter than residential ones are capable of
Re: Baking on the go (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not entirely disagreeing with you but it also depends on how wet the dough is. When I worked at a pizza shop, the stone bottom oven was set to 725f. We started cooking on a pan and removed the pan about 2/3 through the process. The pies only stayed in the oven about 4-5 minutes. A minute or two longer when busy due to temps dropping from the doors opening so much. We ran 2 double deck ovens (4 doors and bottoms) during peak and turned the bottom set down to 300f after the rush so it could be cranked up easily if it got busy again. They took about 4 hours to heat up after being off all night but retained most of the heat when down so it could be brought back up to temp in about 45 minutes or so if needed again.
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Commercial Brick/Ceramic pizza ovens typically operate between 800-900F this is the oldest kind and doesn't have an un-loader bot or whatever you think it requires. These are large and the most expensive and desirable kind of pizza oven all of the others attempt to simulate the pizza this style produces using newer tech
Commercial Deck pizza ovens operate between 450-750F these are the ones most pizza places uses, its a big metal thing with a slot some have a conveyor but its not common
Commercial CONVECTION
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Maybe they have to be built on site rather than made in a factory, and they're difficult to remove without breaking them?
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Eh, pizza ovens usually get set around 550 degrees.
That depends on the style of pizza. If you're baking traditional Neapolitan style pizza (i.e., the kind they make in Naples, Italy, the place where pizza is kinda from), the official regulations [pizzanapoletana.org] say you need a minimum cooking surface temperature of about 900F, and a minimum oven dome temperature of about 800F. Cooking time should be no longer than 90 seconds.
Even at 500 degrees you have to put the pizza on a screen or it will burn on contact with the oven.
I bake pizza all the time at home at the maximum my oven will do (550F). A little while back, I actually invested in a thick steel plate to get more
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hell yes, roving pizza bots!
The future IS HERE! Fuck everyone talking about skynet, I'm talking about ROVING PIZZA BOTS.
I believe roving pizza bots are a sign that the singularity is near.
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The bad news is that you are the toppings.
Roving Pizza Bots...IT'S A COOKBOOK!
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Soylent Pizza is all well and good, but the really important question that I think needs to be answered here is, DO THEY HAVE LASERS?
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The pizza must be baked for 60–90 seconds in a 485 C (905 F) stone oven with an oak-wood fire.[3] When cooked, it should be soft, elastic, tender and fragrant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Mercedes-Benz and Toyota have been in the news for replacing robots with people.
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"Why do you need humans to put on the cheese and toppings?"
They don't.
That's the difference between a real entrepreneur and an armchair one.
You don't need your business to be perfect, you just need it to be profitable within the current environment (well, at least that's the idea of "old school" business -of course as of today it seems you also can become billionaire without any sensible business case as long as you can have the potential to accrue users in the millions and the proper contacts, but that's a
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Yes, it must be terribly ego-crushing to come to the realisation that you completely suck at trolling.
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I'm not so fond of pizza, but I could see myself making the trip to Geneva for an especially good morning lattè [eater.com] from time to time.
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Zucchini on a pizza?
BURN THE HERETIC!