Half baked product: https://weli.dev/blog/half-baked-product/

> Many people enjoy hand-crafted pizza, though, I suggest. Doesn't a machine making your dinner take away the human connection we might otherwise feel with food? "

Not just pizza/food ...but this applies to emails and written documents now.

I don't think the robots are really at fault, but it's just that the kind of businesses that would use the robots in the first place would also not spend the time making good fermented dough, not use the best ovens or the best quality ingredients because they want to make a quick buck in shopping malls or train stations

with the good stuff, a good robot would make brilliant pizza

Food production lines have been built to standardise everything so that (for example) the dough is all the same consistency so it all behaves the same way and squishes into the same size circle when you flatten it.

It seems like humans deal with inconsistencies way better than simple mechanical systems, but I wonder how long it will be until we see robotic food systems which adapt to the specific food which they are making. Like noticing that this particular dough is squished oval or unevenly and adjusting the flattening process to correct it on the fly or adjusting the topping stage to work with an oval base instead of the round one. That will be the real change when it comes.

A local pizza place sells premade dough and toppings. We just order that and cook it ourselves. It’s not perfect but it’s exactly the way we want it and we get to bond over making it. If I’m going to blow pizza-level calories in a meal, I can’t imagine going back at this point.

I wonder how many compromises of quality go into a robotic pizza?

You're not getting a robot to stretch out a 16" New York style crust; you might get it to crudely roll out a ball of dough into a thick disk. I'm sure there are certain toppings that are easy to lay out (sausage balls) and some that are difficult (onion slices) so those might get left off.

At a certain point you're adapting a good pizza recipe into a pizza that can be made by a robot, and at that point you're basically just making a frozen pizza on-the-spot and charging a lot for it.

It's easy to automate making shitty pizzas (Pizza Hut, etc), but real pizzas require quite some dexterity and it seems it would be difficult to automate. Perhaps start with burgers, that would be easier.

They should have a look inside a dr Oetker factory.

I've had my fair share of shitty human made pizza so this kind of sounds like the autonomous taxi news cycle to me

Thousands of car crashes a day > not a news

A Waymo crashed > national news

Humans making shitty pizza is not a news. But robots burning a pizza is a news. It'll get better.