Driverless robotaxis are hitting more and more roads each year and the eCommerce industry is hard at work trying to automate deliveries, but according to ABC7, Brandon Tsai and 23 other former SpaceX employees departed from the $100 billion USD space exploration and transportation company to bring robotics and automation to an entirely different industry — food delivery.
Stellar Pizza is a new, robotics-powered and completely automated mobile pizza restaurant slated to launch in Los Angeles, California, early next year.
The company will launch as a restaurant on wheels with a fully automated kitchen inside that can bake gourmet pizzas in less than five minutes a pie while en route to a delivery destination. The automated restaurant has a peak production capacity of 100 pizzas per hour.
“What we have is an automated restaurant on wheels, and we’ll be able to prepare food on the way to your house,” explained Tsai in his interview with ABC7.
“We don’t have real estate, we don’t have labor. And it’s gonna be a higher quality product, more consistent, because it’s an automated machine that does the same motions every time.”
Tsai’s goal with Stellar Pizza is to find a solution to foodservice delivery challenges, like high commission fees, high operating costs of brick and mortar restaurants, and longer delivery times due to the food being prepared at physical restaurants before being sent out for delivery.
The closest possible parallel would be the Nuro R2 electric cars Domino’s started pilot-testing as self-driving pizza delivery vehicles earlier this year, but they simply delivered pizzas and did not actually make them.
Stellar Pizza automates everything from the preparation of the food to its actual delivery to the customer, bringing the additional (but unintended) benefit of no one but the actual consumer touching their food in this post-pandemic world.
But none of that is worth anything if the pizza is no good. “The pizza’s gotta be good. The machine is cool, for sure but the pizzas got to be good,” said Ted Cizma, Executive Chef at Stellar Pizza.
“One of the funny things we always said in the kitchen was, you know, hey, it’s cooking, it’s not rocket science. And that was before I spent a decade working in SpaceX, where it was rocket science.”
Stellar Pizza will launch next year with several trucks operating across Los Angeles, and you will be able to order from a Stellar Pizza Truck through the company’s dedicated mobile app.
As for prices? They are at $7 for cheese and $8 for pepperoni pizzas (with more to come), which is very affordable, due to the process being automated by robots and not humans.
If all goes well, Tsai hopes to expand the same concept to a variety of other foods and locations.
“What we can do is build other types of machines that produce other foods. But we’re starting with pizza because pizza is such a beloved food item in the world,” Tsai concluded.
