Our invention: An automated pizzeria We realize that we may have assembled a contradiction. Cooking requires the ambiguities of human judgment and sensation. Machines are rule-bound things that require precision. Bringing the two together can sometimes seem absurd (when they fail, certainly) and sometimes like a thing of genius, or both. When the children's writer Roald Dahl joined with the film director Ken Hughes to write "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang," he helped think up a scene that we can appreciate: an eccentric inventor, played by Dick Van Dyke, shows off a breakfast-making machine—a contraption that cooks and serves eggs and sausages—to his children, who watch with wonderment. It turns out that designing a machine that makes fresh pizza from scratch is about as complicated as one that can make breakfast, if not more so. Encountering the future For the moment, our machines are designed with a modern stainless-steel exterior, which you can see in the above picture, and also on an instructional video that we recommend watching. (This appearance can be amended, and we are currently working on alternatives based upon a number of brand ideas that we've been developing.) The machine's design includes a large 32-inch flat-screen TV, which can be used to exhibit advertising—an important source of revenue if you own or lease a machine. The TV can also be used to convey information to you about your pizza while it's being prepared. And it can entertain, making the act of waiting seem shorter than it really is. Until your pizza enters the oven, you'll also be able to watch the machine making it for you. A large window beneath the monitor allows you to do this. What really excites us is the machine's interior: a finely tuned automated pizzeria. The process begins as it often does at your local pizza parlor, with a piece of refrigerated dough. What you'll see after you order your pizza is the dough being spread out. Then toppings are sprinkled on it, and the pizza is moved into a genuine oven—a component that we spent a great deal of time designing—which cooks it. The crust is thin, and it comes out of the oven pleasantly crisp. The cheese melts evenly. The pizza is neither oily nor soggy. Chemicals are not needed to make the dough rise better, as they are in some frozen pizzas, because this is the real thing: dough made with yeast. The whole process lasts only 3.5 minutes, but once the machine gets going it can turn out pizzas every 90 seconds. A family of four can order four pizzas at once and get them all within eight minutes. When all this is done, the machine delivers fresh, hot, eight-inch, personal pizzas in small cardboard boxes. We believe that good design requires an attention to detail, which is why we put vents in the boxes so that steam from the pizza doesn't stay trapped, causing the food to become too soft and unappealing. We have also designed a small cutting utensil that we are working to include with the box. In addition to the pizza, we've given attention to the machine's cleanliness and safety. We have designed the machine so that it is compliant with National Sanitary Foundation and UL standards. If you own or operate a machine, you never touch any of the ingredients, which are delivered to you in sealed packages. The machine does all the work of bringing everything together.