Our Story

This idea came to me years ago.  When watching a show with my kids, a pizza commercial came on that was bragging about new hot bags to make the pizza better when it got to your home.  The thought came to me, why not just make the pizza on the way to the customer and have a hot, fresh pizza right out of the oven when you arrive? 

 

I thought about this more over the coming days, did a little research and added it to my idea list, where it stayed for another year or more.

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Fast forward through a business startup and move to another state, the idea was still near the top of the list.  I don’t remember exactly how the conversation started, but I brought the idea up among some trusted friends, and through discussion with them, I decided I should see how far I could get on developing the idea.

 

Through research I found some highly funded competitors and patents that already existed.  I almost stopped there because I was just a “guy in a garage”.  But the idea persisted and I had to see how far I could get.

 

I’ve been in design and innovation for my entire career.  One of the principles that stuck with me is “fill the bucket”.  You can’t pour ideas out of an empty bucket.  Rather, you need to fill the bucket with information and then you can pour relevant ideas out.

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I dug in and researched everything I could find.  I also watched a bunch of “how it’s made” videos with my kids.  I looked at pizza equipment - not only for pizzerias, but also food automation lines.  I went to multiple Pizza Ex pos and talked to experts in every aspect of pizza making.  I took pizza making classes, made pizza from scratch at home, and visited pizzerias.  I watched the process in every pizzeria closely.

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I also researched the patents and the competitors already in the market.  I researched how they struggled, what their challenges were, how they were doing things. 

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I created a system schematic and listed the biggest challenges.  I looked at what I thought could be done differently.  Then I started working.

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I had no idea how many wrong ways there were to make a pizza hands free!  Even so, I continued.  I learned.  I started small, building one small aspect of the system at a time. Design, refine, build, test, repeat, until I was happy with the results.  I also looked for off-the-shelf components, but found that either they were designed to do continuous production, or the components were too big for what I was trying to do.  The system needed to produce a single pizza on demand,  repeatedly work without human intervention, and be compact.  One example is dough dividing and rounding - most systems are almost half the size of the entire machine and work to produce one ball after another.  Everything had to be custom or customized.

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Many times as I was working friends would share videos and info from competitors, and how they were getting funding.  In some ways it was inspiring, in others it was demotivating.  It was also a new opportunity to learn, critique, and improve.  I still persisted and kept designing, building, testing and modifying.  Eventually I had all the pieces proven and began integrating them into one system.  I added a programmer to start tying the pieces together and adding automated control.  Up to this point I was using manual electrical switches and air solenoids to operate the pieces for testing.  Having someone to work with, to bounce ideas off of, and keep things going really helped.

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Again, persistence through failure.  Learning through difficulty.  It was all a blur of  diagnosing mis-operation, changing out components that proved inadequate, adjusting the program, one thing after another.  It was difficult to get things to work together.  It seemed like everything had to be perfect.  Some days I felt like I would never get there, but still the idea persisted and we kept going.

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I still remember the day when the pans would run around the machine like clockwork.  That was an extremely satisfying day.  I also remember the taste of the first pizza that came out of the oven.  I burned my mouth, but it was delicious!  I think it was the blood, sweat, and tears put in over the years.  But I really like my sauce recipe and crispy fresh crust!  It was gratifying to know that the machine can repeatedly produce a great pizza on demand.

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That leads us to where we are currently.  To this point we have been working solely on proving the concept works, patenting what we have, and making sure the machine can be replicated.  We are now looking for a partner to commercialize and take this machine to the next level.  That’s where you come in.  Let’s continue the journey together!

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We have the seeds of revolution for pizza production and automation.  Let’s see that it gets done, that everyone can enjoy the taste of fresh, hot pizza, right out of the oven; made correctly every time - customized to their preference, delivered right to their door.