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Overcooked? Why robotic pizza makers are failing
- serhack_ 1mo agoHalf baked product: https://weli.dev/blog/half-baked-product/ https://weli.dev/blog/half-baked-product/
- pjc50 1mo agoNice little short story. Reminds me of Juicero, which has to be the flagship of this kind of product.
- dgellow 1mo agoA surprising good read
- delis-thumbs-7e 1mo agoHey! This was good!
- monkeydust 1mo ago> 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.
- smugglerFlynn 1mo ago"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.
- blitzar 1mo agoMy posts are organic but they are not vegan.
- monkeydust 1mo agoThere 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.
- asgraham 1mo agoI have heard multiple people say almost that exact sentence unironically.
- dgellow 1mo agoOver the past months I myself have said that sentence unironically!
- rimliu 1mo agoThat sentiment is very old. 270 years “I apologize for such a long letter - I didn't have time to write a short one” old.
- pjc50 1mo agoI 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)
- zeumo 1mo agoPeople may not say that, but they are more likely to read the hand-crafted email over the LLM-generated one.
- delis-thumbs-7e 1mo agoYou better appreciate a hand-crafted email from a service tech. Might save you anything from tens of thousands of euros/dollars in real money.
- kakacik 1mo agoThere 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.
- JohnFen 1mo ago> something not so common in US I think Not as common as many places in the world, but it's also not rare. How true it is in the US depends a lot on where in the US you are.
- VeejayRampay 1mo agoI 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
- aaron695 1mo ago[dead]
- everyday7732 1mo agoFood 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.
- operation_moose 1mo agoMost 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1-2gdkOe3A The waste gets cycled back through.
- rimliu 1mo agoI doubt it will ever come.It would be waaaay to expensive.
- jimbob45 1mo agoA 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.
- tietjens 1mo agoIt's not that tough to make pizza dough and that's usually where kids have the most fun.
- master-lincoln 1mo agoGood 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...
- abbadadda 1mo ago> "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!
- 1mo ago
- thrownawaysz 1mo agoI'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.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- rimliu 1mo agoGood old "It'll get better".
- _puk 1mo agoIf there's financial incentive for it to, why wouldn't it?
- collabs 1mo agoThe 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
- fuzzfactor 1mo agoWe already have this in downtown Houston but you don't get a Transit van. Instead it's a little battery-powered multi-passenger buggy, covered with ads and limited to downtown. >door --> van --> public transit --> van --> door Still works like this but once you take the train or bus outside of downtown, then you're back on your own for the "last miles" except for a few other non-contiguous neighborhoods where they are beginning to add additional cells of this limited-area connector service. This has been willingly subsidized by the major businesses in each service area, so it is free to use on its own, once you get onto the regular public transit though, then normal fares apply there.
- operation_moose 1mo agoI 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.
- mytailorisrich 1mo agoI don't think any compromises are required. The quality of a pizza mostly comes from the quality of the ingredients and a pizza 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.
- hnlmorg 1mo agoRolling a thin base feels like an easy problem to solve. The question is whether rolling affects the base negatively compared to stretching.
- bakies 1mo agoAnd the answer is yes for specific pizza styles
- hnlmorg 1mo agoNegatively enough that a consumer might notice? Baring in mind we are talking about fastfood here. Not artisan/ restaurant quality food. Genuine question because I’ve never made my own pizza base before so I have no frame of reference here. By the way, which pizza styles were you referring to?
- snovv_crash 1mo agoSpecialized machines can absolutely do a fantastic dough kneeding and rolling process, and spreading ingredients is also trivial with the right tools.
- zarzavat 1mo agoIt'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.
- amelius 1mo agoThey should have a look inside a dr Oetker factory.
- hniwexrpk3 1mo ago[dead]
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- CrzyLngPwd 1mo ago"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.
- Bluestein 1mo agoAre not our robots yet capable of love? PS. Being purposefully contentious here :)
- jaapz 1mo agoThen good luck surviving in our current food system
- CrzyLngPwd 1mo agoI don't, I grow most of my own food, buy from local farmers, and cook all of my own meals from plain ingredients. A lot of love goes into my food.
- trueno 1mo agoMy mom's from a third world country and food is literally her way of showing love and yea i dunno i find robotics interesting but i find myself pretty unamused at a lot of automation attempts in the world that just carry this thick undertone of "fuck people", especially when the chances of UBI are virtually zero in The Default Country. Just feels kinda gross for people to champion the "Doubt all you want but the tech will get better" when a lot of people who don't deserve to be screwed are literally going to be screwed when that day comes. Even with Waymo, like yeah. Cool, car drives itself don't have to talk to a driver sure great. I personally don't feel like it's worth displacing an entire industry of people who don't have other jobs to go to, but some people love to not think about that stuff because futurism. If I call a lyft/uber like both of those aren't my favorite companies at all but I understand the position people are in that work these jobs and it's not a perfect arrangement but I summon them anyways and always treat my driver well and tip well. The _only_ robotics I'd be in here championing "haters gonna hate, itll get better you just wait and see!" is laundry folding machines. I'm annoyed that we're draining lakes over AI, throwing darts on dartboards of low paying wage jobs and spending millions on building robot automation to get rid of them, instead of perfecting the at-home laundry folding machine. Why can't that just be like a global race man I hate folding laundry.
- kotaKat 1mo agoIt 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.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- delis-thumbs-7e 1mo agoI had Pazzi-robot made pizza next to Pompidou in Paris few years back (it is not there anymore, case anyone wonders). I found it fun to watch the arms flip the dough behind the glass and the pizza tasted… Good, actually. Obviously pretty basic, but a lot better than your average fast food pizza-like garbage. Is it equal to good Italian trattoria or Pizzeria da Michele in Napoli, well oviously not. But for the price and speed and, well, hygiene, it was pretty ok. However, the economics of the place are what I questioned even then. Would I go there for any reason except curiosity? No, not really, I prefer to have a pizza date in a real restaurant. Also those robots cost according to the article upwards of $100k, to which you must add power and maintenance, you can hire quite a few pizza chefs with that money. So not only it need to be faster and better than your average pizza baker - the most time of making the pizza is the time it spents in the oven, which is also critical - it needs to brimg in crowds as well in order to be profitable. So yet again this seems to me a dumb way to use automation and robotics. Either you have to make those robots out of cardboard and make them last forever, or the financials just do not even out and you just make average pizza at a huge loss. Just because you can automate somethong does not mean you should.
- gpiechnik2 1mo ago[flagged]
- josefritzishere 1mo agoRobots make shitty pizza because they can't care. Your moms cookies are always best for the same reason.
- beej71 1mo agoIn Seattle airport there's one of those McDonald's that has you order from the touch-screen booth and then pick up at the counter. (Maybe they're all like that now?) Just so dystopian to my eye. It didn't help that I was reading Mona Lisa Overdrive at the time. :) I know fast food employees typically don't give a fuck (I was one way back) but there's always been something about a human being being there that I fundamentally appreciated about the experience. [Cue the Carl's Jr ordering scene in Idiocracy] And that counts double for the food being made. I don't want to hang the soulless robot painting in my house; I don't want to consume the soulless robot food. Even the teen just aching to get through his shift can't avoid imparting humanity to their work. If the burger is off-kilter, a person did that, and that's different than when an unsensing, unfeeling bot does. [Cue the burger reveal scene from Falling Down] But I'm old, so... you young whippersnappers and all that. Maybe it's different.
- newsomix9xl 1mo agoI read about a Japanese pizza maker: he went to Italy to study the craft masters, found the best flours and experimented with novel combinations, hand built a wood fire stove, and used choice produce and flawless execution to make world class pizza. For a robot pizza maker I'm guessing the back story is like this: entrepreneur who knows nothing about pizza decides paying minimum wage is a waste and opts to buy $160k in machinery to make mediocre pizza cheaper and faster.
- soupfordummies 1mo agoSusumu Kakinuma is the guy and Serinkan is the restaurant. About as good as it gets.
- newsomix9xl 1mo agoNo doubt. What's the plans to add robots to his setup? My guess: none.
- conorcleary 1mo agosoylent green, plus distributed ovens