Picnic Works develops intelligent robotic technology for food service and hospitality, with flagship products the PPS Leonardo and the smaller PPS Michelangelo designed for high-volume, low-customization environments. Its systems are deployed or piloted in sites including universities, stadiums, big-box retailers, commissaries, pizzerias, and a U.S. Navy base, and the company recently ran a pilot with one of the world’s largest retailers. Picnic positions its automation to address rising labor costs, productivity shortfalls, and food waste by improving consistency, reducing waste, and enabling staff to focus on higher-value tasks. The company said it will use new capital to scale operations, ramp up production, accelerate delivery capabilities, and meet growing North American demand. Picnic emphasizes customer-centric partnerships and has cited use cases ranging from traditional pizzerias to high-volume venues like sports arenas. Picnic is a Seattle-based food automation company that has developed the Picnic Pizza System, a pizza-assembly machine for restaurants and commercial kitchens. The system dispenses fresh ingredients onto hand-made dough and enables a single employee to produce up to 100 12-inch customized pizzas per hour. The recipe and ingredient dispensing can be tweaked to suit the restaurant or kitchen owner. Picnic positions the system as small-footprint, contactless, easy to install, and available with no upfront fees. The company has been iterating on system enhancements throughout 2021 and is preparing installations with additional customers. Recent financing will be used to grow the team, attract talent, and expand commercial operations to scale deployments. Picnic develops robotic systems that automate the pizza-making and assembly process. The company says interest in its pizza system has ramped up recently and it has announced partnerships with Orion Land Mark, Ethan Stowell Restaurants, National Service Cooperative and Baseline Hardware Financing. Picnic plans to roll its technology out to restaurants and other public gathering spaces, including schools, stadiums and hospitals. The latest financing will be used to add headcount and expand operations. The article positions Picnic as one of a handful of companies targeting pizza automation alongside peers such as XRobotics and the now-exited Zume. Picnic designs an internet-connected pizza-making robot that can produce up to 300 12-inch customized pizzas per hour, using a vision system, conveyor, and automated sauce, cheese and topping dispensers. The company is preparing for a commercial rollout and says demand has increased during the pandemic as operators seek lower-contact food preparation. Picnic’s business model is pizza-as-a-service: restaurant owners pay a recurring fee for the system plus maintenance and software/hardware updates. The recent funding will be used for product development, hiring, responding to customer interest, and marketing. Picnic has expanded its team, hiring a chief food scientist and a vice president of sales, and was a finalist for Hardware/Gadget of the Year at the GeekWire Awards. The company has operated under prior names Otto Robotics and Vivid Robotics and is positioning itself amid competitors and pilots from larger players testing kitchen automation. Picnic develops a configurable, modular automated pizza assembly system that launched in October and integrates with cloud analytics. The platform focuses on high-volume pizza production, reaching rates of up to 180 18-inch pizzas or 300 12-inch pizzas per hour. It is designed to fit into existing kitchen layouts, including food trucks and kiosks, and connects to Picnic’s software for backend data to improve consistency, speed, and reduce food waste. Picnic operates on a robotics-as-a-service subscription model, with users paying for the system on a subscription basis. The company has deployed its system with customers including Centerplate and Washington-based Zaucer Pizza. Picnic recently raised $5 million in seed funding to support product development, hiring, and marketing and has added experienced hires including Kennard Nielsen (VP of engineering) and Mike McLaughlin (VP of product).

Total raised

$34M

Funding rounds

5

Latest round

Equity

Latest activity

Oct 2024