Longtime readers of Headline Health know that I like to keep up with the latest news on pizza, a staple of good nutrition and one of the main structural foundations upon which western civilization was built.
Although it has its humble origins in Italy, pizza has gone though many different incarnations and has been a vehicle for innovation that never ceases to amaze. Imagine being among the first to order a delivery pizza by phone, for example, from the local shop.
Pizza producers spent much of their time over the last 10-15 years trying to figure out how to put more cheese in the product. Hence the stuffed crust. Recently, one of the chains began trying out a hot-dog-stuffed crust, which I believe is dangerously close to the edge of culinary indecency.
Which brings us to the vending machine pizza, now on its way to the U.S. The brainchild of a European company called Let’s Pizza, it will bake a pizza from scratch in three minutes. The machine takes coins, bills and credit cards.
After depositing your money, the machine prepares the dough, squirts sauce on it, puts on the cheese, and adds other items you may have selected before baking it in a 380-degree infrared oven. It then drops it into a box and delivers it through a pickup slot.
A 10-inch pizza will cost $5.95, according to an article in the Los Angeles Times.
Expect to see the machines at malls, gas stations, bus stations, convenience stores and wherever fine foods are sold.
The Let’s Pizza people make a point out of cleanliness and one company video boasts that their pizzas are “untouched by human hands” and are in fact made in “a human-free environment.” Even the guy who replaces the packages of ingredients in the machine wears a pair of latex gloves, like a dental hygienist.
That’s one thing nice about ordering a product made by a robot — you don’t have to worry about whether it’s washed its hands. The worst that can happen is that it might have a little WD-40 on it.
Here’s a link to another company video that’s been Americanized with hip, jazzy background music and a male announcer who sounds eerily like actor Troy McClure of the Simpsons.
(“Hi, I’m Troy McClure. You may remember me from such nature films as Earwigs: Eww! and Man vs. Nature: The Road to Victory.”)
The video clip ends with a picture of a laptop and concludes: “Retailers can manage and operate the machines remotely from any location in the world.”
It’s part of the new era of (human-free) retail. Let the good times be dispensed.
