PIZZA PIZZA

Certainly one purpose for engineering effort is to make our lives more “livable”, less burdensome and in my opinion, more fun.  Reduction in everyday stress and overall workload have definitely been accomplished with marvelous inventions that reduce hours of labor to an-attended, automatic operations.  Case in point—the dishwasher, the clothes washer, central heating and air, the airplane, telephone,  “stair-master”  etc etc.   You get the point.  Now to get a little more serious, look at engineering contributions to the health care industry.  MRIs, Cat-Scans, ultrasound, respirators, infant incubators just to name a few and how about pizza?  Wait just a minute.  Did he say pizza?  Did he really say pizza?    OK, pizza and vending represent one “fun” aspect of engineering.   Serious but fun.   This blog concerns itself with pizza vending.  I will be taking data from a wonderful article written by Charles Murray. Charles is an editor for Design News Daily. 

Fresh pizza may be coming to a vending machine near you. The Let’s Pizza machine can do what no mechanized predecessor has done. It kneads and unrolls dough, stamps it flat, adds fresh ingredients, cooks, boxes, and delivers a pizza — all in less than three minutes. Its distributor, A1 Concepts of the Netherlands, plans to put the machines in airports, malls, theme parks, hospital waiting rooms, bus stations, train stations, laundry mats and yes, college dorms.   I recommend one on every floor if we are talking about dorms.  OK, it 1:00 A.M. in the morning.  You’re studying for a mechanics final, it’s raining outside and you really are hungry.  I mean really hungry.   The very last thing you want to do is get dressed, get in the car, try to find something open, and then get back having used an hour of your precious time.  How about the pizza vending machine right down the hall? 

“Everything about these pizzas is fresh,” Ronald Rammers, CEO of A1 Concepts, told us. “There’s a bag of flour, specially mixed, that comes straight from Italy. We combine it with fresh water, fresh sauce, and fresh toppings.”  A JPEG of the vending machine is as follows:

The Italian inventor Claudio Torghele spent six years perfecting the mechanized vendor, with the idea that it would do more than simply zap a frozen pizza with microwaves. His machine mechanically mixes the dough from bags of water and flour and then passes it through a series of shaping and pre-heating stations that create a flattened and partially baked pizza base. A conveying tray moves the preheated crust beneath metering devices that squirt on the tomato sauce. Other distribution components add cheese, sausage, ham, and fresh vegetables. The machine then moves its product to an infrared oven for about a minute before putting it in a cardboard container and sliding it through a slot in the front of the machine.

Torghele told us he conjured up the idea while visiting California and seeing the emphasis on fast food. His vision originally called for a pasta machine. “After we started building it, we decided that pizza would be a more global product, so we changed it.”

Not surprisingly, the biggest challenge was building a hygienic machine. “All of the parts come in contact with the elements,” Torghele said. “We had to find technical solutions to guarantee” that the food would be safe.   Hygiene and safety are absolutely necessary and critical to commercialization. 

The patented solutions include a dough mixer that prevents accumulation of material in its drum and in adjoining metering chambers. “He thought of everything,” Rammers said. “If the machine doesn’t sell a pizza for 24 hours, the timer tells it to mix the dough, and then the machine throws it away in a trash bin.”

Like most current day vending machines, the Let’s Pizza is Internet-enabled. Using a microcontroller and a multitude of specialized software algorithms, it can read information from its 40 onboard sensors and communicate with the outside world. “When it’s almost empty, the machine sends a signal to your phone or your laptop that it needs to be refilled,” Rammers said. Each machine holds enough ingredients for about 200 pizzas.

The machine has been available in Europe since 2009. A1 Concepts will set up its first US Let’s Pizza in Atlanta in late August. The company is working on a plan for machines to be assembled by an American partner.

Competing machines have used microwaves to heat up frozen pizzas, but Rammers said he wouldn’t be surprised if the Let’s Pizza’s success spawns imitators. “Other people are sure to try to build one after they see this. But right now, this is the only one of its kind.”

I think this is a real winner and one great example of “fun engineering”.  What do you think?  Let me hear from you.