French Pizza Could Now Be Made By… a Robot?

A slice of pizza sitting on top of a table

Ah, pizza. One of the only foods in the world that can be considered both a garbage fast food or an expertly-crafted local tradition, depending on where you’re eating. But one company is trying to slice that disparity down the middle.

A French startup called Ekim has built a robot that can cook up to 120 pizzas an hour, three times faster, they claim, than your average pizza chef. Some might call this blasphemy — after all, don’t we already have frozen pizza and 3am dollar slice if we want to eat a Pizza Margherita that tastes like cardboard? But Chief Executive Philippe Goldman is not perturbed by the haters, saying, “People nowadays have less and less available time to eat, they hardly have 30 minutes to have lunch. Therefore, they have to chose between time and food quality. What we’re doing is providing both.”

The choice to make a pizza robot as supposed to, for example, something more traditionally French, might seem an odd choice for a French startup. Does this come from a nostalgia for bottom dollar college days, or could Ekim be subtly implying that French cuisine is too complicated to be handled by a simple robot? Either way, the company is scouting for new locations for Paris’s first 24-hour pizza vending machine. Bon appétit… we hope.

hereWant to see France’s 24-hour oyster vending machine? Check it out .

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