ABB Robots and the Rocky Road of Robot Pizza

Pizza robots keep failing, from Zume to Picnic's machines at Moto Pizza. How ABB FlexPicker lines, YuMi at BurgerBots and long-term support change the math.

INDUSTRIAL ROBOTICS

Chat With Robot

9/26/20261 min read

Pizza has always been hand work. A pizzaiolo stretches the dough, spoons on the sauce and slides the pie into a hot oven on a long wooden peel. A good one does it quickly and rarely drops the pepperoni in the wrong place.

Cook in a white hat using a long peel at a wood-fired pizza oven with a red brick wall
Cook in a white hat using a long peel at a wood-fired pizza oven with a red brick wall

A pizzaiolo sliding pizzas into a wood-fired oven. Photo: Carlos Ebert / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Robot pizza was supposed to change that. Zume used robot arms to assemble pies in California and shut down in 2023. Pazzi and the pizza vending company Basil Street have gone too, although vending machines like this one in Cluj-Napoca still pop up in cities.

Illuminated pizza vending kiosk with a touchscreen at night
Illuminated pizza vending kiosk with a touchscreen at night

A pizza vending machine in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, September 2026. Photo: Sciking / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The BBC reported on 27 August that two Picnic robots at Moto Pizza in Seattle, which cost $160,000, became "basically useless" when Picnic shut down in May and support vanished. At T-Mobile Park the same machines had cut a pizza crew from about ten people to two. A Bank of America analyst said food robots still drop ingredients in the wrong places.

Low office building behind an empty parking lot and trees
Low office building behind an empty parking lot and trees

Zume's headquarters in April 2023, two months before the company shut down. Photo: Busition / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Moto Pizza's problem was losing the supplier. Pizza factories have run with robots for years because every pie on the line is identical. ABB's IRB 360 FlexPicker picks and places food at high speed, with cameras guiding it through PickMaster software, and the same kind of cell can top and pack frozen pizzas.

Row of ABB delta robots above a stainless steel food line
Row of ABB delta robots above a stainless steel food line

ABB IRB 360 FlexPicker robots on a food assembly line. Photo: ABB

In restaurants, BurgerBots in Los Gatos opened in 2025 with an ABB YuMi assembling burgers. Anyone buying a kitchen robot should ask who will repair it in five years. ABB says it keeps 98% of its spare parts available, and it has remanufactured thousands of older robots.

ABB YuMi dual-arm robot placing a burger into a box at a restaurant counter
ABB YuMi dual-arm robot placing a burger into a box at a restaurant counter

An ABB YuMi assembling a burger at BurgerBots in Los Gatos, California. Photo: ABB

Moto Pizza's founder, Lee Kindell, is now building his own square-pan pizza machine inspired by 3D printers and hopes to have it running by summer 2027. My guess is that restaurant robots will start with single jobs like saucing or slicing, while the dough stretching stays with people for a good while yet.

Man at a laptop beside a glass-walled ABB FlexPicker robot cell
Man at a laptop beside a glass-walled ABB FlexPicker robot cell

An engineer setting up an ABB FlexPicker cell with PickMaster software. Photo: ABB

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