Picnic's collapse leaves Moto Pizza with two idle $160,000 robots

When Picnic shut down in May, the technical support for its machines went with it.

Lee Kindell, founder and chief executive of Moto Pizza in Seattle, was left with two cabinet-like robots he told the BBC cost $160,000 and were now "basically useless". The dough feeder, the sauce and cheese modules and the pepperoni-sprinkler all stopped.

"I don't know if I want to do a partnership again because of the failures," Kindell said.

That is the first lesson for anyone selling hardware into someone else's kitchen. The buyer is not purchasing a machine, they are purchasing the vendor's continued existence.

Picnic is not an isolated case. Zume, Pazzi, which used robot arms to assemble pizzas, and Basil Street, which sold pizza vending machines, have all come and gone.

Sara Senatore, senior restaurants analyst at Bank of America, said the promised results have not arrived. Food preparation robots are sometimes clumsy and drop ingredients in the wrong places, she said, while humans are very efficient at making pizza. Bank of America has financial interests in several pizza chains, including Papa Johns and Domino's.

Senatore also argued that removing staff carries its own risk: customers can be left with nobody to step in when a machine goes wrong.

The labour case, on the evidence available, is more subtle than replacement. Kindell used Picnic's robots at T-Mobile Park, home of the Seattle Mariners, where he says a pizza setup would normally need about 10 people. With the robots it needed two, and he says the other eight stayed employed, serving customers and selling pizza around the stadium.

The engineering ambition has not gone away. Canadian firm Appetronix installed a 24/7 robotic pizza unit for the Donatos chain at John Glenn Columbus International Airport last year.

Co-founder and chief executive Nipun Sharma says the aim is a pizza every minute. His team is trying to cut sauce deposition from the 9.5 seconds it currently takes to about 1.5 seconds, using what he describes as a shower head that blasts the sauce, and is looking at lasers and ultrasound instead of a knife blade for slicing.

Sharma is explicit about the customer he is chasing: the chain market, where the pizza should taste the same every time. That is the honest boundary of the category. Paul Giannone, owner of Paulie Gee's, told Mashable five years ago he would never use a robot, and told the BBC that remains the case.

The wreckage still has value. Miso Robotics of California, which makes the Flippy fry-cooking robot, bought the intellectual property formerly owned by Zume, more than 300 patents.

Chief executive Rich Hull said Zume's vision was brilliant but "a beat too early in the market". He suggested the patents could extend Flippy's capabilities but did not point to a specific example.

Kindell, who once made all his dough by hand until an elbow tendon injury pushed him towards machines, is now building his own robot. It will make square pan-style pies, is inspired by the way 3D printers work, and he says a fully operational version could exist by the summer of 2027. He also says he has no experience in robotics.

For a hardware founder, the pattern is worth reading twice. Three suppliers folded, one operator was stranded mid-service, and the surviving asset was a patent portfolio sold to a company doing something else. The market for the machine outlasted every company that built one.