Modern science has figured out a way to cram nearly every other food item into a vending machine, so folks in the U.S. can finally rest knowing that soon their piping hot pizza will come from there too. A European device soon hitting U.S. shores is capable of spitting out fresh, made-from-scratch pie in under three minutes.
Let’s Pizza, an Italian creation, has already proved successful after three years in Europe and now A1 Concepts, the machine’s Netherlands-based distributor, has announced it will inaugurate the first Let’s Pizza box in Atlanta later this year. A1 CEO Ronald Rammers expects a rapid expansion after that, according to PizzaMarketPlace.
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Let’s Pizza’s greatest trick? Going from cash to piping-hot pizza in 2.5 minutes, using an infrared oven that cooks the just-made dough at more than 700 degrees Fahrenheit.
Each bright red vending machine can hold up to 200 ingredients, giving machines a virtually unlimited array of toppings to offer (although users will only be able to choose from four varieties). Once selection—and payment, of course—is made, a pre-packaged bag of flour mixes with a previously sealed bag of mineral water to make the dough. The machine kneads the mixture and flattens and rolls it out to about 10.5 inches in diameter — “untouched by human hands,” as the vaguely germophobic video repeatedly points out. The handy-dandy machine then squirts on the sauce and lays out each of the selected toppings from individually vacuum-sealed pouches. Once topped, the pizza enters the now pre-heated oven.
And in about 2.5 minutes, users get their pizza, packaged neatly in a cardboard box (we love our boxed pizza almost as much as we love vending machines). Each machine is connected to the Internet to keep track of when it needs to be restocked.
While the suggested retail price of a Let’s Pizza is $5.95, the actual price will vary based on location, with some popular spots — airports and amusement parks, for example — charging more. Rammers hopes to put his boxes into supermarkets, universities, transportation hubs and shopping malls. He claims that since Italians love Let’s Pizza, Americans will too. Since Americans also adore boxes and vending machines and hate touching people, we can see this contraption doing very well indeed.