PIZZA Vending Machine

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/14/business/worldbusiness/14vend.html?_r=2&partner=rss


In Italy.


Lucio Tonina/SITOS

The Let’s Pizza vending machine at a shopping mall in Trentino, Italy. It can turn flour, water, tomato sauce and fresh ingredients into hot pizza in a few minutes for a price as low as $4.50.

The European vending machine industry, which has grown significantly and now has annual sales of about 26 billion euros, or $33 billion, hopes the trend will catch on.

Much recent growth came with the placing of vending machines in factories and offices, where employees took coffee breaks or lunch from machines. But as recession bit into Europe and factories and offices closed, that market has contracted.

At the same time, Europeans are looking for less expensive ways to eat out, and the automat is far less expensive than a white-tablecloth restaurant.

“These are developments that we are watching,” said Luciano Iannuzzi, chief executive of Argenta in Carpi, Italy, a large vending operator with about 120,000 machines.

The idea for a pizza robot came to Mr. Torghele after he worked in California in the mid-1990s creating a fresh pasta manufacturer. “At food courts I saw a trend toward vending machines,” he said at his office in this mountain town. “In fast food, I saw pizza everywhere.”

With backing from a Dutch investment fund, his own capital and money from friends, he set to work. A plan to simply miniaturize industrial technology for producing frozen pizza failed, but by 2003 Mr. Torghele had produced a machine ready to be tested in Chicago and shown at a trade fair in Orlando, Fla.

That same year, with the help of Unilever, the British-Dutch food giant, he test-marketed 20 machines in Germany. “We had a bicycle,” he said. “Now we had to pedal.”

The machine Mr. Torghele and his engineers produced is outfitted with little windows so the customer can watch the pizza being made. As in the Charlie Chaplin film “Modern Times” (in miniature and without Chaplin) wheels turn and gears grind. The customer presses a button to choose one of four varieties — margherita (plain cheese and tomato sauce), bacon, ham or fresh greens. A plastic container dumps flour into a drum resembling a tiny washing machine; a squirt of water follows, and the drum goes into a spin cycle, forming a blob of dough that is then pressed flat to form a 12-inch disk.

Tomato paste is squirted onto the dough and cheese is added before it is lifted into a small infrared oven. The baked pizza then slips onto a cardboard tray and out into the customer’s waiting hands. Mr. Torghele says the pizza will cost as little $4.50, depending on the variety.


I don't know if this is old news to anyone.. but I want to buy a pizza from there (*¬*)/

thats so awesome. Trust the italians to come up with a great pizza invention like that

Well...That's a useful invention X3

Fuggin want.

dude thats pretty coool