Trucks. Robots. Pizza. This story has everything that we as Americans in the year 2018 are looking for.
Pizza Hut, not often thought of as a trailblazer in the world of technological innovation, has been stretching its abilities far beyond just pizza. Remember those sneakers that could order pizza? That was pretty cool. But now, we’re talking about promotional trucks (zero emission promotional trucks, mind you) that pull up with a pizza-making robot in the truck bed.
Here’s the full rundown of how it works, thanks to The Verge:
The concept is fairly simple. Robot arms first pull out a preassembled pizza from the mini-refrigerator, then place the pizza onto a high-speed ventless conveyor oven. A second robot arm transfers the finished pie onto a cutting board, divides the pizza into six pieces, and slides it into a pizza box. The whole process takes around six to seven minutes.
Here it is in action:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z67RI5CXRDk
“We are always looking to find more ways to bring the oven closer to the doors of our customers,” Nicolas Burquier, chief operations officer for Pizza Hut, told USA Today. “Our obsession is always the same: How do we reduce the gap between the moment when the pizza comes out of the oven and when the customer starts to enjoy eating our product?”
Pizza companies are doing a lot to diversify their offerings these days. Domino’s rolled out that promotional campaign where it would dispatch road repair crews to pave over potholes, thus avoiding ruined pies en route to the customer. (Also: baby registries.)
This isn’t even the pinnacle of Pizza Hut’s foray into the 21st century pizza world. Oh, no.
We’re talking self-driving cars, y’all.
Back in January, Pizza Hut and Toyota announced their design of the e-Palette, which would pretty much combine every burgeoning millennial trend: ride-sharing, mobile commerce and self-driving vehicles. (Also pizza)
And guess what? Toyota is also working with Amazon and Uber on it, so you can bet your bottom dollar there will be more commercial delivery via self-driving vehicle.
You won’t see any on the roads now bumping their way over potholes Domino’s missed. But, Toyota plans to unveil them in real life for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, followed by tests in the U.S. later that year.
So, when economists and technological leaders ask, “What’s next?” There’s overwhelming evidence that the answer was here all along.
It’s pizza. It’s always been pizza.
And it always will be.
