A team of former SpaceX engineers have designed a pizza machine that creates instant fresh pizza made entirely by robots. They’ve named their business Stellar Pizza and recruited more than 23 other employees once employed by billionaire Elon Musk.
The machine outputs a pizza every 45 seconds and is set to begin taking orders later this year in Los Angeles.
The company’s founders, Benson Tsai, Brian Langone, and James Wahawisan, are all former employees of the space exploration company headquartered in Hawthorne, California. It’s no surprise that this project is highly dependent on engineers to control every aspect of the pizza-making process.
Additionally, the pizza machine fits into the back of a truck which will travel around serving up fresh and instant pizzas.
But many may still wonder what connection, if any, is possible between a multi-million dollar space exploration company and pizza. The answer is Ted Czima, former SpaceX executive chef, who formed the company’s Food Service program which fed the staff.
However, Cizma wasn’t alone. He collaborated with pizza consultant Noel Brohner to figure out the recipe for great quality and decently priced pies.
The result is a build-your-own-pizza style business which customers can customize to their heart’s content. And behind it all is a state-of-the-art touchless pizza machine.
The pizza machine
Of course, the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about machine-made pizza are two wacky robotic arms tossing the dough in the air. And while this would be a great idea in general, it’s definitely not the most efficient way to make a pizza.
Enter the dough press.
The machine works this way: First it deposits pre-made dough balls onto a double-sided heated dough press which cooks it just enough to receive toppings. Notably, pre-cooking the dough in this way also prevents it from getting too moist when the sauce is added. The press is essentially a large steel cylinder which gently lowers onto the dough ball to flatten it out, leaving a thicker edge for the crust and ready to receive toppings.
The process is mechanically exact, as it must be to produce consistently great quality pizzas. The press, for example, features an integrated vision system which identifies the center of the dough ball. This makes sure that every pizza crust is identical in proportion and form.
We’re very sorry not to have mechanical pizza arms, but the scientific minds at Stellar Pizza would all agree that it’s not optimal.
Next, the pre-formed and pre-cooked crust enters the topping line which is encased in a steel chassis reminiscent of a computer CPU. The machine can handle up to 10 toppings, including sauce, cheese, pepperoni, and other pre-chopped ingredients.
There are several parts to the topping line, and first up is, arguably, the most important: the sauce station. Several different colored cables connect into a steel dispenser which drops the red pizza sauce in ‘dots’ around the center of the crust.
Then, shredded cheese falls from another dispenser onto the pizza before moving onto the chopping station. Here pepperoni is chopped ‘fresh’ from meat logs and the slices fall onto the pizza rotating below. The pie can then receive any combination of 8 other ingredients, such as bell peppers and sausage.
Once all the preparations have been made, and every ingredient and topping added by a flawless automatic process, it’s time to bake. The pizzas slide onto a conveyor belt which carries them into one of four ovens loaded onto a truck. This is the final step of the process before boxing them up which is one of the only tasks requiring an actual person.
The new hot-n-ready
While it would be nice to have a robot make a pizza and deliver it, the company is not quite there yet.
Every part of the pizza machine fits neatly into a large red truck with the Stellar Pizza logo painted on it. The idea is to drive the truck around and set it up at certain locations where people can pick-up their pizzas. As of now the company is set up to start with 3 or 4 trucks, and eventually expand into a fleet.
The pizzas are priced at $7 for a regular cheese pie, and $8 for a pepperoni pie. Adding more ingredients would probably up the price, but the point is that they should be affordable. Stellar’s mission is somewhat akin to a model used by some popular pizza chains.
Little Caesars, for example, is known for their ‘Hot-N-Ready’ pizzas which originally only cost $5 and were always ready and warm. And there’s also other free pizza delivery options available today for those who know tricks of the pie trade.
Stellar wants to do the same, but with a more efficient automatic process that delivers freshly made pizzas instantaneously, without having to keep them warm. After all, who knows how long other pizzas spend on the warming racks?
More information is available on the company’s instagram account.
Story by Fernando Acevedo
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