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Pizza Hut Unveils 'Mobile Pizza Factory' As The Food Delivery War Heats Up

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Credit: Pizza Hut

As restaurant brands from McDonald’s to IHOP race to figure out how to incorporate delivery, Pizza Hut is dipping its toes into the second iteration. The company today announced a partnership with Toyota to develop a prototype vehicle that includes a “kitchen” that cooks pizzas en route to the customer.

The Tundra PIE Pro features a refrigerator, computer-guided robotic arms and a portable conveyor oven. The company claims the automated pizza-making process takes about 6 to 7 minutes from start to finish. It also touts the vehicle’s zero-emission features, as the vehicle and all of its equipment are powered by a hydrogen-fuel-cell electric powertrain.

Pizza companies have decades of experience in the delivery space, but the quickly growing channelestimated to be worth $76 billion by 2022means it is no longer a differentiator for the segment.

But for Pizza Hut, the objective with this prototype is to differentiate by “bringing the oven closer to the customer’s door,” according to COO Nicolas Burquier.

“We’re exploring any opportunities to streamline our processes and systems that impact our team members’ experiences and making their lives easier and safer, and then we’re looking at how that impacts the customer experience,” Burquier said. “We know we have an opportunity to do those things and we’re looking at it through the lens of improving those experiences.”

The Tundra PIE Pro marks the second prototype between Toyota and Pizza Hut. The companies’ first blueprint, for a fleet of driverless delivery vans, was first announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. Both ideas have one major feature in common: automation.

For the Tundra PIE Pro, when a pizza is ordered, the first robotic arm opens the refrigerator and removes the selected pizza, places it on the oven conveyor, and returns to close the refrigerator door. The pizza is then sent through a high-speed ventless oven, according to the company. On the opposite side, a second arm removes the finished pie, places it on the cutting board, divides it into six identical slices, boxes it up and delivers it to the customer. To create this automated process, Pizza Hut partnered with Nachi Robotics System Inc.

“We’re looking at automation to see where it adds value. It definitely makes it safer and easier, but the rest we’re learning along the way,” Burquier said.

“The rest” includes how much the truck could potentially cost franchisees (Pizza Hut is 99% franchised) and the actual timing of a rollout. There is no timeframe goal, though Burquier said he’d “love for it to be soon.”

“We will obviously have to make this work from a cost standpoint. What we’re doing today is really figuring out how it will work and what we will learn from this, how this is going to do when we put it in front of the consumer and how they react,” he said. “In this space, sometimes we don’t know what we don’t know.”

Although it’s been delivering for about 30 years, Pizza Hut is intensely focused on this space right now. Last year alone, the company announced it was hiring 14,000 delivery drivers to speed up the service, developed a “delivery network algorithm” aimed at improving accuracy and reliability, introduced a new delivery pouch with 3M Thinsulate Insulation thermal technology, and launched the Pizza Hut Delivery Tracker, which includes Amazon Alexa and Chatbot ordering capabilities.

“We’ve been innovating in this space for a long time and this (Tundra PIE Pro) is a natural extension of our DNA,” Burquier said. “The key driver for us is reducing the amount of time between the oven and the customer door. The more we can reduce that time, the better we can be. I’m excited about our opportunity to improve the customer experience.”

Although the delivery space is getting increasingly crowded, Burquier believes Pizza Hut has an advantage in the pizza segment simply by having more points of distribution, with about 6,300 U.S. locations. This is compared to Domino’s about 5,600 locations, Papa John’s 2,600 locations and Little Caesar’s about 4,300 locations.

But saturation may not matter much in the future of delivery as competition deepens. Venture capitalists have poured $3.5 billion into food delivery companies so far this year, underscoring just how significant the opportunities are in this space. Such ramped-up delivery innovation will continue to blur the lines of foodservice, adding far more competition to Pizza Hut’s radar that just other pizza companies (see, for example, UberEats virtual restaurants).

Even in the pizza space specifically, and even in this second iteration, expect the delivery race to intensify even further. Pizza Hut, for example, isn’t even the first in the segment to test an oven-on-wheels conceptthat distinction belongs to Zume, which dates all the way back to 2015. Not to mention, competitor Domino’s continues to accelerate its driverless delivery vehicle test with Ford, and upstarts, like Pieology, are dipping their toes into drone delivery. Who knows which technology will emerge as the most practical to scale, but the race to get there should be interesting.