Imagine this: a robot that’s capable of churning out a pizza every 47 seconds, up to ten pizzas at a time – yielding around 80 an hour – with perfect accuracy. After all, robots don’t forget recipes, nor do they mistake parmesan for pecorino when the line is out the door. These robots, unlike their ersatz human counterparts, don’t even need a single toilet break throughout a shift. Ordering and payment, naturally, is also handled electronically. That’s what the Pazzi, Pazzi Robotics’ eponymous pizza robot, promises with its second robot-operated pizzeria that opened in Paris last year. It sounds almost too good to be true.
And in a sense, it is. The technology is by no means perfect – even if the French company is achingly close to getting there. In terms of uptime, CEO of Pazzi Robotics Philippe Goldman tells us they’re at 97 per cent. That remaining 3 per cent goes to maintenance, cleaning and restocking – not every ingredient can be restocked without shutting off Pazzi (which means crazy in Italian).