We Tried Pizza Made By a Robot Chef

This article originally appeared on VICE France.

Besides being crushed to death under the steely palm of a haywire Tesla humanoid, one of humanity’s biggest anxieties about the future of technology is machines coming along and taking all our jobs.

As automation changes the makeup of our workspaces, from factories to warehouses, it’s hard not to wonder if what work as we know it will look like a few decades from now.

The owners of Pazzi, a small pizza franchise in Paris, are skipping the wait and discovering for themselves, by hiring a mechanical arm that looks like it escaped from a car assembly line as their primary pizza chef.

Placed behind a transparent wall for all to see, the robot chef can make up to three pizzas at a time. The choreography is well-oiled – the robot picks up a ball of dough and flattens it with a red cylinder, covers it with sauce and toppings and puts it in the oven. After a few minutes, it puts the pizza in a box and then pops it through an opening for customers to collect. Orders are also placed digitally via a self-service terminal. Everything is automated, but under the constant supervision of human employees.

The robot’s skills don’t stop at pizza making – while working on the dough, it can also embark on elaborate choreographies to the rhythm of music blasted from the restaurant’s speakers.

“We took a chapter from show cooking and ran with it,” said Sébastien Roverso, one of Pazzi’s founders, referring to restaurants like the American Japanese franchise Benihana, where chefs cook in front of customers in a spectacular way. “We’re quite transparent – the point is to make it fun to watch,” said Roverso. 

Juliette Lansoy, the IProject engineer in charge of the machine’s software, explained how the robot works. “Inside the arm, there are 120 moving parts and 200 sensors,” she said. “It’s enormous. There is an almost endless combination of things that can go wrong. And with this kind of model, when one thing doesn’t work, the whole thing breaks down.”

Pazzi’s pizza maker is not the only robot designed for the catering industry. In 2018, Miso Robotics – which specialises in this field – created Flippy, the section chef now flipping 150 burgers an hour at the CaliBurger fast-food franchise in Pasadena, California. Earlier this year, the world’s first paella making robot caused quite a stir in Spain, with detractors criticising the use of robotics to make the traditional dish.

Restaurants without kitchen teams have also sprung up in Guangzhou, China and in Berlin. But the most prominent example comes from the Spyce restaurants in Boston, where, under the supervision of Michelin-star chef Daniel Boulud, the robot Spyce makes healthy meals from scratch in five minutes or less. Invented by four hungry, broke MIT students, the robot was initially employed at the university’s cafeteria and created to simplify healthy eating for those who can’t cook.

Earlier this year, my colleague Andrea Strafile from VICE Italy tested pizza made by Mr. Go, Rome’s first automated pizza vending machine. Let’s just say he wasn’t impressed.

Another even less successful experiment with pizza robots came via the American manufacturing company Zume, which, back in 2018, tried to flood the US with a fleet of automated pizza trucks, but has since shut the experiment down.

Technology may be part of our daily lives, but we often associate machines in restaurants with poor quality food and high-profit motives. But Roverso claims his pizza is different from previous attempts because it uses fresh ingredients, saying the recipe was perfected with the help of pizza chef Thierry Graffagnino. “We could have gone a lot faster if we hadn't tried to make excellent pizzas,” Roverso explained.

I put my assumptions to the test and ordered one slice of Margherita and one of four cheese pizza. Overall, I thought Pazzi’s pizza wasn’t bad. Its thin, crispy base provided a good contrast to the Neapolitan pizza trend that’s taken Paris by storm – but it also reminded me of the texture of frozen pizza baked in my home kitchen oven.

“We don’t intend to replace the neighbourhood pizzeria,” said Roverso. “We wanted to be the first in this niche.” Although pizza maestros will always win the best pizza battle, robots will probably be used more and more in fast food chains like Pazzi, because they make preparing food quicker and cheaper, the two cornerstones of the takeaway industry. Pazzi’s pizza is a good example of that latter point – in one of the most expensive areas of the French capital, the dishes come at a very competitive price.

Proponents of catering robots tend to believe that those robots will never replace human creativity, only take care of the labour-intensive parts of the process. “At the end of the day, it’s an assistant,” said Enrique Lillo from br5, the company behind the first paella robot, in an interview with The Guardian. “It’s a bit like the orange-juicing machines. That’s a robot too, people just don’t realise it, and so is a coffee vending machine. No one looks at those and goes: ‘Crikey! It’s stealing jobs from people!’”

If you’re still threatened by the advent of automation, fret not – the first few weeks of work weren’t easy even for Pazzi’s robot, which still needed to take a maintenance break every now and then. In the meantime, Pazzi’s self-stated goal is much more humble than world domination. All they’re hoping for is to last longer than Zume.