XRobotics’ countertop robots are cooking up 25,000 pizzas a month

Summary

XRobotics thinks it has cracked the code on getting pizza restaurants to adopt robotics. The San Francisco-based robotics company built a countertop robot called xPizza Cube, which is roughly the size of a stackable washing machine, and uses machine learning to apply sauce, cheese and pepperonis to pizza dough. The machines, which lease for $1,300 a month for three years, can make up to 100 pizzas an hour and be retrofitted to work with pies of different sizes and styles like Detroit and Chicago deep dish. “This saves like almost 70, sometimes 80% of the time for the staff,” Denis Rodionov, the co-founder and CEO of XRobotics, told TechCrunch. “It is just repeatable work. If you have a pepperoni pizza, you need to place 50 slices of pepperoni one by one.” XRobotics is not the only company that has tried to introduce robotics into the restaurant industry — nor the only one focused on pizza. Zume is the most notable pizza robotics company — if that can be considered its own category. The company raised more than $420 million in venture capital for its robotic pizza trucks, before pivoting to focus on sustainable packaging in 2020, and shuttering entirely in 2023. Rodionov argues that they’ve been successful where other companies haven’t because they aren’t trying to fully transform the pizza-making process, as Zume was, but rather build technology to help existing pizza makers save on time and labor. Because they are building assistive technology, as opposed to replacement tech, Rodionov said they’ve been able to keep their device small enough to fit in existing kitchens and priced at a level that pizzerias ranging from mom and pop shops to large chains, both of which the company counts as customers, could afford. The company found this out the hard way. The company launched in 2019 and introduced the first version of the technology in 2021. XRobotics’ first robot was significantly larger, and could work with more than 20 toppings, and ran into the same problems as th...