Watch This Vending Machine Make Pizza
News broke today that Sprinkles Cupcakes will install New York City's first 24-hour cupcake ATM at its Upper East Side location next week. The unit has a 760 cupcake capacity and can dispense up to four sweet treats at a time. That's pretty cool—but not as cool as a vending machine that makes fresh pizza in under three minutes. Behold Let's Pizza:
Invented by entrepreneur Claudio Torghele, Let's Pizza machines were initially designed and manufactured in Northern Italy. Customers choose between up to four kinds of pies, and watch through windows as the machine adds water to flour, kneads the dough, layers on the sauce, assembles the toppings, and bakes the pizza in an infrared oven in just 2.5 minutes. There are fun windows so customers can watch their pies being made. It can produce 90 to 100 pizzas before it needs to be refilled.
In a piece for The Gate, writer W. Andrew Powell (who shot the video above) said, "In all my travels, I have never seen anything like it. ... While it’s silly and not exactly the best pizza you’ll ever eat, it’s still amazing, and kind of fun." But it still has to be better than the slices sold for $1 at some NYC pizza joints.
The machines are available in Italy and the UK, and, according to a 2012 interview with A1 Concepts' CEO Ronald Rammers in PizzaMarketplace.com, they may soon be making their way to the United States. I'm starting the campaign to get one in the mental_floss offices now.