Waste management is always top of mind as a restaurant owner or food service provider.
Across the US, 54 million tons of food is wasted every year, with almost 27% of all food waste coming from a combination of food service and retail industries. For restaurants specifically, the statistics don’t improve.
Food waste across restaurant and food service industries is a big problem. According to the US Department of Agriculture, food waste is estimated at between 30-40 percent of the food supply, meaning that you actively put time, resources, and energy into the procurement, management, and service of food that ultimately goes to compost at best and a landfill at worst.
So, what can be done about reducing food waste and ensuring that you’re set up for success when it comes to waste management? And how do these two areas impact the most crucial metric that you care about most: the bottom line?
Food waste is defined as food that completes the food chain cycle and is distributed ready for consumption but doesn’t get consumed due to spoilage or expiration. Food waste commonly occurs later in the food supply chain during the consumption stage.
Food loss is defined as spoiled, spilled, or lost during the food supply chain before reaching its final destination: the plate. Food loss commonly occurs earlier in the food supply chain during harvest and production.
Food waste occurs across all stages of the value chain, but according to the Boston Consulting Group study, waste is especially prominent during production and consumption. To counter this point, you need to become reactive during these stages to see the most significant gains in reducing food waste.
Food waste in the U.S. generally occurs due to excess and higher portion levels. Therefore, businesses need to re-examine these factors in their food service operations and streamline them to reduce waste. An easy way to do this is by measuring and improving precision to ensure that businesses are only using what they need to create a meal.
According to research by the National Restaurant Association and Rethink Food Waste Economics and Data, reducing food waste by improving precision could actually increase jobs by 15,000 per year as businesses see an increased profit margin due to saving costs on food waste.
Implementing better precision is also tied back to portion sizes. Food waste occurs within the restaurant and food service industry as larger portions increase the likelihood customers will not eat all of the food on the plate (Behmen-Milicevic, 2019). By being precise and accurate with serving sizes and portion control, restaurants can save substantial amounts of money.
You’re likely to be familiar with having to throw out spoiled or unwanted food—a problem that even the most streamlined operation will face. This is a consumption issue and one that businesses are tackling by introducing initiatives like repurposing food scraps into new meals and measuring their food waste.
A 2019 study from the World Resources Institute found that restaurants that actively measured their food waste and found ways to reduce production, order less food, and repurpose scraps saw changes happen—fast.
Swedish furniture megastore IKEA implemented food waste measurement in a handful of pilot stores and saw a reduction of 80,000 pounds of food in six months, saving them a cool $1 million. And that’s not all. Restaurants in the study cut food waste by an average of 26% in a year and 58% over three years and found that for every $1 they invested in tackling food waste, they saved themselves $7.
Climate change is one of the most critical topics facing the world, and food waste is part of the problem. The US Environmental Protection Agency outlines three key environmental benefits that come with actively reducing food waste:
Wasted food often ends up in a landfill, which is “similar to tying food in a plastic bag,” as the wasted food decomposes and releases methane gas which traps heat and warms the planet.
Food waste isn’t just wasted food. Disposing of unwanted food also wastes water, energy, pesticides, land, labor, and fertilizers.
Composting and recycling food helps eliminate dependency on landfills which is generally better for the environment.
A quick formula to benchmark your food waste is to divide the total weight of your food waste over a set period of time (one week, a month, one service) by the number of covers in the same time period. This data will give you an insight into how much food you’re wasting per cover and should be the catalyst you need to make changes.
You could even separate out the waste into separate categories, such as prep waste, spoilage, and leftovers, to gain valuable insights into exactly where you need to focus your food waste reduction efforts.
Introduce employee training around the importance of food precision or level up your kitchen by introducing automated prep stations that ensure accuracy in food preparation.
Work with local suppliers to cut down on your business’s carbon footprint and help to save the environment. Not only does this help support the local economy but you can also work with independent and local suppliers to repurpose imperfect food (dented carrots, soft plums, etc.,) into drinks, purees, and other ingredients to help eliminate food waste.
Not everything has to be thrown away. Many restaurants focus on creating innovative dishes and menus by using odds and ends from the cooking process. Silo in London, England is a restaurant that only creates dishes using food waste, and Rhodora in Brooklyn, NY, follows a similar tack.
You’ll also have the opportunity to impress your guests with novel and exciting ideas, not to mention saving big bucks on the cost of ingredients.
Not all your food scraps will make for tasty new dishes; some will have to end up in the compost. This is a surefire way to reduce reliance on landfills and helps to create bioenergy meaning fewer dollars spent on traditional energy sources.
The possibilities (or should that be POS-ibilities…) of upgrading your restaurant tech stack are endless. Cloud-based alternatives to the traditional paper methods save on administrative and labor costs and help you to actively reduce food waste by reducing order errors.
Updating your kitchen technology is also an opportunity to introduce eco-friendly appliances to lower utility bills and use less energy, saving you even more money in the long run.
Interested in learning more about how Picnic’s automated pizza assembly station can help you reduce waste in your restaurant operation? Contact us today.
Scott Erickson, SVP, Marketing at Picnic
Working with pizza every day, I learned quickly that the only consensus in pizza making is that there is absolutely no consensus on favorite toppings. Pepperoni—highly loved by many but reviled by others. Pineapple—hated by most but a vocal minority of true supporters. At Picnic, part of my role is to figure out what customers need and want. But I wanted to get at something deeper than just the ingredients: what do people really care about when ordering pizza?
In January 2022, we polled 1000 U.S. adults and asked all kinds of questions about pizza, automation, robotics in kitchens, and their unique preferences. We tapped leading business and hospitality researchers Dina Marie Zemke, PhD from the Department of Applied Business Studies at Ball State University and Carola Raab, PhD from the Department of Food and Beverage, Meetings, and Event Management at University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Working with Drs. Zemke and Raab, we built upon their previous kitchen robotics research to formulate the poll and dig into what Americans really think about pizza and food automation.
We’ve got a lot of information about toppings (more on this in an upcoming post, I promise) but what struck me was that the overwhelming desired ingredient—consistent quality.
Pizza represents a meal that’s equally comfort food, a good value for money, and a sharable experience with friends and family. And despite our preferences for style of crust or types of veggies, Americans told us that consistent quality was the most important attribute they care about when ordering pizza. We saw this from women, men, people who frequently dine in, those who prefer take-out, and even those who call for delivery. In fact, the results were so universally consistent across the top eight attributes, we only saw some variation in importance of price for people who frequently dine in.
At Picnic, we make automation that helps kitchens succeed. We look for solutions that address real needs with real outcomes. Pizza making is messy, it wastes a lot of ingredients, and requires speed that doesn’t always lead to precision. By creating the Picnic Pizza Station, we can get far better portioning and placement of ingredients than traditional pizza making.
Does your large call for 42 slices of pepperoni? The station makes it so. Six ounces of sauce and not a drop more? No problem. With less than 2% food waste and robotic precision, the Picnic station can deliver up to 100 precise pizzas per hour with just one operator.
With robotic automation in America’s pizza kitchens, we can help guarantee the consistency necessary for the delight of guests everywhere. And the good news? 82% of Americans agree that robotic technology will help provide consistent and accurate pizza orders.
When we couple that finding with the fact that the least important factor in ordering pizza was “being prepared by people,” we have a recipe for kitchen automation success. Are people ready for kitchen robots? I can say that our research shows that yes, they are, overwhelmingly ready.
You’ve seen the reader boards in front of fast-food restaurants. Maybe you’ve posted one yourself. “Now hiring: $1000 bonus.” “Line cooks wanted: $20/hour.” Companies are offering to hire employees with nothing more than a 30-minute interview.
And despite the bonuses and rising hourly wages, there are more than 1.4 million open restaurant and hospitality jobs right now, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Even when you fill a role, it’s not a guarantee that it will stay filled. Pizza restaurant attrition is generally 4 weeks.
The labor shortage remains a pressing issue for the hospitality industry. This was true before the pandemic and remains true today. What’s a pizzeria owner supposed to do in the face of this? Savvy operators are turning to automation to augment their stretched staff.
The Society of Human Resource Management reports that hiring and training a new employee costs a company about six months of a salary. At the pizza industry average wage of $12.95 and a typical 25-hour-per-week role, that means it costs you more than $7,500 every time you need to replace a line cook—which can be every couple months in this climate. That’s right: the hidden costs of your employee turnover can be up to $45,000/year.
It costs you more than $7500 every time you need to replace a line cook.
After advertising for, screening, interviewing, and ultimately hiring a new person, you still have to train them. The first few weeks on the makeline can be inefficient and the consistency and quality of your pizza can fluctuate. Beyond the expenses of training and ramp-up, sloppy saucing and freehand cheese coverage can affect your food costs, too.
While the phrase “food automation” might bring up visions of Rosie the robot or Captain Picard ordering “tea, Earl Grey, hot,” there’s nothing futuristic about it. Restaurateurs have adopted automation for years, from the dough sheeter to the food processor to the automatic dishwasher.
With every innovation in food automation, kitchens become more efficient and restaurant worker jobs become less tedious. Once you’ve run a rack of dishes through a sanitizing dishwasher, you probably don’t find yourself nostalgic for the three-part sink.
In a pizzeria, the pizza makeline is ripe for efficiency through automation. It’s why Picnic invented the Picnic Pizza Station, an automated pizza assembly system that tops pizzas with the same precise and consistent amount of sauce, cheese, pepperoni, and other toppings, every time.
When the team at Texas A&M Dining brought the Picnic Pizza Station to their kitchen, they were quick to appreciate the value of adding an automated pizza makeline. “What used to take three people now only requires one, which allows us to free people up to do other critical duties in the kitchen,” said Marc Cruz, District Executive Chef at Chartwells.
The Picnic Pizza Station fills those jobs you can’t hire for and is trained from day one. It doesn’t have an argument with its sweetheart the night before and it’s never distracted by its phone. Even better, it lets your best employees work directly with your customers at the front of the house. Smiles can’t be automated.
If you do the math, you’ll see that by adding the Picnic Pizza Station to your busy kitchen, you can achieve a positive return on your investment in the first month. Imagine fewer unfilled jobs, more consistent pizzas, lower food waste.
In fact, we estimate that for the average mid-sized pizzeria turning out 150 pizzas a night, you can save $31,496 per year with a Picnic Pizza Station performing as your makeline.
Want to try out your own numbers? Check out our savings estimator. Answer some questions about your pizza production, employees, and food waste and the estimator will help you understand how the Picnic Pizza Station can serve your bottom line.
The labor shortage in the food service industry isn’t likely to subside for some years to come. Food automation offers a way to fill unfilled jobs, keep your best employees where you need them, and produce delicious, consistent pizzas that make your customers come back for more.
We came, we saw, we put on masks, we made a lot of pizzas. The Picnic Works team returned to Las Vegas in January for CES 2022 for a reprise of our award-winning collaboration with our partners from Centerplate and Sodexo Live.
Robot enthusiasts and hungry CES visitors alike were delighted to see the Picnic Pizza Station on the show floor and taste the delicious pizza from Centerplate. The Picnic Pizza Station produced hundreds of pizzas over the three-day conference.
“It’s impressive to see how Sodexo Live and Centerplate are working to create innovative food experiences through technology, automation, and innovative guest services,” said Scott Erickson, SVP of Marketing at Picnic.
In addition to a partnership on the floor with Centerplate, Picnic was proud to be represented in the Washington State Department of Commerce booth alongside other Washington innovators including food delivery startup Minnow and medical device company Parrots.
This year at CES, there was growing attention on food automation, including a half-day special event focused on the future of food technology and innovation sponsored by The Spoon.
Picnic CEO Clayton Wood participated in a lively discussion about “our food robot future” and explored the many roles automation can play as restaurants continue to face labor shortages and shifts.
Although the show was smaller than initially anticipated, it was great to be back in person after the virtual CES of 2021. Navigating the new world of pandemic events was seamless. CES managed the spaces, the on-site tests, and precautions well. For those who chose to stay home for another year, CES digital apps and platforms helped blend the in-person experiences with the virtual.
Attending a conference focused on the technology of the future is an inspiring way to kick off a new year. The Picnic team came home ready to solve new problems for its customers in 2022 and start dreaming of a return trip to Las Vegas in 2023.
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.
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.
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.
Restaurants and commercial kitchens face a number of challenges that have accelerated in the Covid era:
This means many smaller restaurants are struggling to survive, and larger kitchens at places like schools and stadiums are under tremendous stress to deliver the quantity, quality, and consistency of food to maintain customer satisfaction. Operators know they need to find new ways to run their kitchen if they are to lower costs and remain successful.
Meet the Picnic Pizza Station. It’s the essential automated, robotic back-of-house makeline that allows one person to make up to 100 consistent pizzas an hour while reducing food waste to around 2%—a significant reduction from what most kitchens experience today.
You can use your kitchen’s own recipe and ingredients in the station to top pizzas with the same precise amount of sauce, cheese, pepperoni, and granular toppings, making a consistent pizza every time. The system is modular, so it fits into existing kitchen operations. And because employees never handle ingredients, you get significantly improved hygiene in the kitchen.
“ You can use your kitchen’s own recipe and ingredients in the station to top pizzas with the same precise amount of sauce, cheese, pepperoni, and granular toppings, making a consistent pizza every time.”
The Picnic Pizza Station can integrate with existing POS systems. Kitchen operators use an intuitive touchscreen interface, and managers can view a dashboard to track ingredients and predict inventory needs. The system is easy to learn, so minimal training is required.
Restaurant owners should consider the benefits of decreased labor cost, less food waste, increased hygiene, and increased consistency of pizzas in an easy-to-operate and maintain workstation. The food automation offered by Picnic becomes the obvious choice for any kitchen seeking to embrace the future of food preparation.
You can call it a pizza robot. But we like to talk about the Picnic Pizza Station as a “cobot” because it works in collaboration with your kitchen staff.
The team at Picnic includes roboticists, electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, food engineers, software developers, and industrial designers. It takes a lot of real people and human innovation to build the technology behind our kitchen automation.
The Picnic Pizza Station has been in operation in a variety of kitchens since 2020 and our customers are excited about the possibilities of full deployment. We are also working with several notable industry partners to further advance our solution.
At Pizza Expo in 2021, demand was so high that all available units were fully subscribed shortly after the show opened. Given this enthusiasm, Picnic is rapidly increasing staff, design, and manufacturing capabilities to meet growing demand.
You can now reserve one of two configurations for 2022 delivery.
If you are concerned about profitability, labor shortages, output, food waste, and consistency, and are looking for an easy way to bring automation to your kitchen, the Picnic Pizza Station is your perfect solution. Talk to Picnic today about a demonstration and see how the Picnic Pizza Station can help in your kitchen.
Have you been to a restaurant lately that didn’t have a help wanted sign in the window? Restaurants and kitchens of all sizes are facing a massive labor shortage, which is impacting their ability to remain open, maintain quality and offer great customer service. When kitchen owners can find employees, they are having to pay them more, which is impacting profits. Since it’s unclear when this labor shortage will end, kitchens are increasingly bringing in automation and robotics to help prepare food.
This is where Picnic comes in. Our Picnic Pizza Station, a configurable automated pizza assembly system, is finding tremendous success with kitchens and restaurants that serve pizza. But one thing that is really helping Picnic thrive, (our secret sauce, so to speak) is not just employing robotics and automation experts, but a deep investment in food engineers. We know that unless the pizza is topped to perfection, looks and smells delicious, and has wonderful mouthfeel, automation can’t effectively deliver against its promise. And that requires food engineering.
Meet Dr. Gabriella Mendes, who has joined Picnic as Senior Food Scientist. Gabriella grew up in Brazil and was fascinated with food from an early age. She says food engineering is a multidisciplinary field that combines principles of engineering applied to food science to study the composition, processing, conservation, deterioration, elaboration, quality, and commercialization of food.
Food engineers have skills in chemistry, biochemistry, nutrition, and microbiology, and they apply those skills to all facets of food production. Gabriella makes sure that not only can our automated system prepare food, but that the food is safe to eat, has great mouthfeel, and is nutritious and delicious.
“ Gabriella makes sure that not only can our automated system prepare food, but that the food is safe to eat, has great mouthfeel, and is nutritious and delicious.”
Growing up on a farm, Gabriella loved to watch her mother make cheese, butter, yogurt, and ice cream from scratch using milk from the cows surrounding the grounds of her native home. She has always been fascinated with the process and became even more curious about food preparation, food safety, and quality.
As she grew, she realized her passions for chemistry, biology, and physics could be applicable to a career in food engineering. She went on to pursue a Food Engineering “Ph.D.” at Purdue University in Indiana and did her post-doctoral while working at the USDA where she oversaw multiple projects to support food safety, quality assurance, and pathogen reduction.
At Picnic, Gabriella ensures that the approach to robotics and automation development also factors in how ingredients and production of the food will result in a perfect and delicious pizza every time. Other food robotic and automation companies are focused on the machine engineering, where at Picnic, food science and engineering are always treated with equal importance.
The Picnic Pizza Station uses ingredients like cheese, sauce, and meats and vegetables to top pizzas. Ensuring the system can handle these different types of ingredients, while maintaining top quality, wonderful visual impact, and delicious taste requires a lot of partnership from the automation engineers and the food engineers.
In her daily work, Gabriella practices both food science and food engineering. For example, as a food scientist, she tests sauce for viscosity and sample toppings for pH to recommend optimal ingredient characteristics. As a food engineer, she comes up with ideas to design better mechanical systems for the toppings modules and works with our mechanical engineers to bring them to life.
Gabriella’s favorite afternoon snack is Pao-de-queijo, a Brazilian cheese bread. But her favorite cuisine is Italian, including pasta, lasagna, and especially pizza! Her favorite pizza is Chicken Alfredo.
When asked the highly controversial question about whether pineapple should ever be included on a pizza, she said, “absolutely yes!” She loves how the sweet flavor of the pineapple complements salty toppings like ham or bacon.
“ The goal at Picnic is to be the essential back-of-house makeline that transforms the future of food preparation through robotic automation and human innovation.”
The goal at Picnic is to be the essential back-of-house makeline that transforms the future of food preparation through robotic automation and human innovation. Gabriella and the food science team help ensure restaurant owners and their customers love the pizzas that the Picnic Pizza Station makes.