Donatos Pizza, the midsized Columbus, Ohio-based chain, debuted its first fully autonomous robotic pizzeria at the John Glenn Columbus International airport last summer. Now it has a name and even its own website and press kit.
When Donatos unveiled it, the company simply called it a “robot-operated restaurant.” Since then, it has been officially dubbed Pepptron, and its website can be found at pepptron.com.
“This is not sci-fi,” the website’s featured video announces, using visuals that look very sci-fi indeed. “This is sci-pie.”
“The future has arrived, and it brought pizza,” the video goes on to say. “From cool tech comes hot pizza.”
Let’s be clear: this robotic “pizzeria” is basically an ultra-high-tech vending machine that makes pizzas on the spot in about six minutes. It’s certainly not the only one of its kind—there are several out there—but it’s the first one that was developed by a legacy pizza brand (in a partnership with robotics company Appetronix) for its franchisees.
A robotic arm does much of the work, moving a premade dough skin through the kiosk’s interior machinery for toppings—deposited by an automated dispenser—then a generous sprinkling of Parmesan, and finally popping it into a small oven. A robotic slicer cuts it into squares, and voila!
Like all pizza vending machines, Pepptron is designed for non-traditional, high-traffic locations such as airports, college campuses, hospitals and shopping centers.
Jeff Baldwin, Donatos’ vice president of development and franchising, recently told Nation’s Restaurant News that the machines will ultimately be paired with local operators.
“The best model for operations is one that leverages local expertise,” Baldwin said. “That could be a large foodservice contract provider complementing its larger business, a local market franchise partner who is extending their traditional restaurant footprint, or even a market franchise partner who has multiple Pepptrons covering a geographic area,” he said.
And, despite the sci-fi razzle-dazzle, Nipun Sharma, the CEO of Appetronix, has said that customers at the Columbus airport hardly gave the machine a second glance. He described one woman who picked up her pie with utmost nonchalance, as if “she’d been doing it her entire life. I’m, like, man, you just bought something that’s never been done before in human civilization. And you didn’t even blink an eye!”
Then, again, that woman might have previously ordered pies using similar tech from PizzaForno, which has been opening robotic units all around the country over the past several years. PizzaForno, however, licenses its units to aspiring pizza entrepreneurs who don’t have a brick-and-mortar location.
In the case of Pepptron, customers can compare the robot-made pies to those prepped and baked in an actual Donatos restaurant. The brand has two sit-down restaurants in that very same airport (in concourses A and C), plus 24 stores in the city of Columbus and dozens more in central Ohio.
So what did Pepptron’s customers say? “The robot pizzas were deemed universally superior,” Sharma told PMQ last July. “The AI doesn’t make mistakes. And if it does, it rejects the pizza.”
