I had Pazzi-robot made pizza next to Pompidou in Paris few years back (it is not there anymore, case anyone wonders). I found it fun to watch the arms flip the dough behind the glass and the pizza tasted… Good, actually. Obviously pretty basic, but a lot better than your average fast food pizza-like garbage. Is it equal to good Italian trattoria or Pizzeria da Michele in Napoli, well oviously not. But for the price and speed and, well, hygiene, it was pretty ok.

However, the economics of the place are what I questioned even then. Would I go there for any reason except curiosity? No, not really, I prefer to have a pizza date in a real restaurant. Also those robots cost according to the article upwards of $100k, to which you must add power and maintenance, you can hire quite a few pizza chefs with that money. So not only it need to be faster and better than your average pizza baker - the most time of making the pizza is the time it spents in the oven, which is also critical - it needs to brimg in crowds as well in order to be profitable.

So yet again this seems to me a dumb way to use automation and robotics. Either you have to make those robots out of cardboard and make them last forever, or the financials just do not even out and you just make average pizza at a huge loss. Just because you can automate somethong does not mean you should.