Customers come to Seattle nearly every week to enjoy a demo of the Picnic Pizza Station at Picnic Works. Seeing the station firsthand, pizzeria owners, chefs, and kitchen managers marvel at the smooth functioning of the system and the precisely placed sauce, cheese, and toppings on every pizza.

That precision is the result of years of invention and innovation by our brilliant roboticists and mechanical and electrical engineering team. And that’s not just our bias—the team behind the Picnic Pizza Station has received issuances on two U.S. patent applications related to our food automation technology.

In particular, the patents focus on the technology that allows the station to accurately meter and place sauce and pizza toppings such as cheese, meat, and vegetables on a base such as a pizza dough as it moves along a conveyor belt system.

Automation helps controls food costs

Making precisely topped pizzas is labor-intensive from the outset, even when it’s done by hand. “It’s particularly challenging for automation because the liquid that you’re dispensing, which is to say the sauce, isn’t always the same consistency,” says Steve Remis, Senior Director of Systems Engineering at Picnic. “This patent shows that the technology we’re building for our customers solves an automation problem for them and allows them to control food costs and increase the accuracy and quality of their pizzas.”

“This patent shows that the technology we’re building for our customers solves an automation problem for them and allows them to control food costs and increase the accuracy and quality of their pizzas.”

The modular assembly line of the Picnic Pizza Station builds each pizza order according to a kitchen’s recipe by applying sauce, cheese, fresh-sliced pepperoni, and toppings into a preferred configuration. At the other end of the station, the pizza can feed directly into an oven, or you can retrieve the pizza for refrigeration or immediate baking.

See our patented technology for yourself

Interested in a demonstration of the Picnic Pizza Station to understand how our patented food automation technology and robotics-as-a-service can help your business? Contact us today.