Interviewee
Clayton Wood, CEO of Picnic, an automated pizza station that can improve foodservice labor costs by as much as two-thirds, doubling to tripling four-wall EBITDA margins. The Picnic Pizza Station saves kitchens time, money, and labor by automating pizza preparation—allowing the customer to elevate the experience.
Transcript
Clayton Wood: My career spans a lot of different industries. Started out in the building industry, spent several years in aerospace in the last 15 years or so, I've been doing startups and I joined Picnic about four years ago and picnic is just a fascinating opportunity. We're automating pizza assembly. It's really the future of food service. Huge opportunity, lots of fun, technically lots of fun in the business side and lots of pizza.
Elisa Muñoz: Really interesting. And how does it actually work? Like, I'm really interested, how big is it? How easy is it to assemble? Or maybe like, does anyone need any specific introduction in order to make it work?
Clayton Wood: It's very simple to use. What we've chosen to do is we are actually automating, owning the assembly of the pizza. So we don't do dough handling and we don't do cooking because those are two things that are really varied. Pizza operator to pizza operator, very specific, but everyone has to assemble their pizza. And the hard problem that we've taken on is we don't just assemble a pizza, our goal is to assemble any pizza. So any ingredients that the chef wants to use, our goal is to be able to put that in our machine and assemble the pizza to the recipe. So our station starts with a prepared dough and we, we like to say we're dough agnostic.
So you can use fresh frozen par baked hand tossed, thick, thin, irregular shape, square around any size, any shape, any thickness. And you put the dough in the station. We have computer vision that reads the size and shape of the dough. And then it moves down to the conveyor and it goes past a series of stations. First station applies sauce and then cheese and then fresh slice, pepperoni off of a stick. And then what we call gra toppings, ground sausage, ded vegetables, sliced mushrooms, whatever toppings you want. And we produce it ready to cook pizza, it could flow right into an oven or you could take that and wrap it for later cooking. You can, you can buffer it for a big rush hour, whatever you want. And what's unique about our station is that every pizza we make is customized size, shape, and toppings.
And that includes the customer can choose light or heavy or omit any topping you want. So completely customized pizzas and a single operator can make a hundred pizzas an hour all customized with Air station. So it's a very high productivity gain for anyone who's operating a pizza restaurant and we're seeing a lot of market interest.
Elisa Muñoz: Wow. It's really interesting. And like why pizza, What makes pizza a unique market for this kind of food service?
Clayton Wood: Yeah, so the company was really founded on the basis that it was basically automation engineers looking for a good place to apply automation and focused on food service and then focused on pizza. Because pizza is popular worldwide and pizza delicious, why wouldn't you wanna automate pizza? It also happens to be a food that is difficult to do consistently. Most of our customers are actually looking for consistency is more important than the labor productivity because in the food service industry these days, food service jobs, there's been a labor shortage since the, before the pandemic it's much worse since the pandemic, but it's very hard to keep workers in the job.
Average tenure of a food service worker in the United States is seven weeks if you can believe that. So these restaurants are frequently staffed by people who just got there, aren't really trained very highly and in a rush hour they get in a hurry. And what happens when you get in a hurry and you're trying to make a pizza, you throw some food around, you get the recipe wrong, you're doing your best, but it's hard, right? And so doing it consistently to a recipe is actually a hard problem and it's very valuable to the operator to be able to save the food waste, produce a consistent pizza to the recipe and to do that at high volume.
So pizza's a great food to do that with. It also happens to be probably the most popular food on the planet, maybe of rice, maybe more popular than pizza. But pizza, pizza we've seen interest from all over the world and so we think we're in a great spot.
“Everything went to delivery and carrying out hygiene became an important thing. Limiting the number of people in the kitchen became critical. People stopped wanting to work in food service, which became an advantage for operators.”
Elisa Muñoz: We talked about the pandemic. Did you find any critical challenges when it comes to the procurement process? I mean, since you're also building hardware?
Clayton Wood: Absolutely. Yeah. So before the pandemic we were, we just started piloting the fall of 2019. We were piloting at T-Mobile Park, which is a baseball stadium home of the Seattle Mariners. We also were at a consumer electronic show in Las Vegas in early 2020. And both of those were with sodexo, these opportunities. And so we were really building up. We had lots of interest from lots of people we got named to, when we went to ces, we were actually on the show floor making pizza, working for Sedexo. Sedexo was selling pizza slices using our station. We weren't an exhibitor but we had a giant space because Sodexo just reserved the space to, to sell pizza and was a tremendous success.
We got named to multiple CEO best of CES lists and we were just there making pizza with our customer. So it was an exciting time. And then right after, you know, within 60 days of that event, everything shut down. So the Las Vegas Convention Center shut down t-Mobile Park. There was no baseball, no conventions. So we, our pilot activity kind of stopped in its tracks at that point. Luckily we, that was an early prototype that we were piloting with at that point. So we were doing development of our new production version. So we just kept working.
We had the good fortune that we were able to continue working through the pandemic. We had a lot of people working from whom hardware engineers obviously need to come in and put their hands on their hardware and continue that work. But through a really good practice of, of contact tracing and limiting the number of people in the office. We got through that with no, we got through that first year with no, no cases, no positive cases in our company. Didn't really lose momentum. And the other interesting thing that happened was because in food service all the changes just completely accelerated in the food service world.
Everything went to delivery and carrying out hygiene became an important thing. Limiting the number of people in the kitchen became an important thing. People stopped wanting to work in food service, which became a thing for operators. So all these trends were, were trends that were operated before the pandemic, but they all accelerated dramatically during the pandemic. So the labor shortage, that was before the pandemic, was 800,000 open serve food service jobs in the US predicted to go to 1.5 million by 2025 by the National Restaurant Association. It's 1.5 million now. So it accelerated tremendously through the pandemic. So the problems are much worse for operators finding workers.
Elisa Muñoz: What has been the biggest technical challenge that you guys have managed to solve whenever it comes to, to the company?
Clayton Wood: I think the biggest technical challenge we have is one that we didn't necessarily anticipate when we started. And that is because we are setting out, we have this ambition to make any pizza we're doing, we're handling food. It's one of the reasons that, you know, the, the, there's so few companies actually dealing with food. Food is really a hard problem to solve. I tell our team, you know, hardware is a hard way to do startups. Automation is a hard segment of hardware and food automation is a hard thing to automate. So food handles very differently, depending even if the same food takes cheese, cheese will behave differently depending on the, the relative humidity, the age, the, the way it's cut, the way it's shredded, it'll behave differently and how it's been handled before it got to the station.
And we've seen this where if it's not handled properly before it gets delivered, it can create issues. So just learning how to handle a wide variety of food and how it behaves, how to dose it out in a, in a precise way to get exactly the right amount on the pizza and get it well distributed. That's a really hard problem. So we actually have a whole food science department working on that all the time, testing customer ingredients to expand the list of ingredients that we have approved. And it's a, it's a real barrier to entry for anyone who wants to get into automating pizza. And it's a reason why some other people in pizza automation have chosen to make one pizza.
They figured out how to make one kind of pizza with one kind of ingredient and then it works and they stop testing others. We're much more ambitious than that.
Elisa Muñoz: How fast is it in order to make a pizza? How long does it take?
Clayton Wood: So it's interesting that it takes about a minute to make the first pizza, but the difference between our station and some others is that because it's a conveyor, by the time the first pizza is made, there's multiple other pizzas that are already in progress. So it's not actually the one pizza at a time. That is the speed, the speed is the throughput with volume. Early on when we had our first demo station, it was just a tabletop prototype and we had some investors over and we had 26 people in the office and people were standing around talking and we said, okay, everybody ordered their pizza and then we'll watch the system work.
So everybody ordered their pizza watch system to work and then just within, within like 10 minutes every surface in sight was covered with pizza. Cuz these pizzas just keep coming out, you know, every few seconds there's another pizza and another pizza and another pizza and no one was doing anything. There was no hustle or brussel, there's no ingredients flying. It was just, you know, it's just, it's a pizza machine. So these pizzas are just coming out so fast and that's really the magic of it is how fast you can make a large quantity of pizza. It's not that you can make one pizza faster than a person, it's that you can make, you know, any quantity much faster than, than a crew of people can make.
Elisa Muñoz: Clayton, do you have any advice for future entrepreneurs or engineers starting in the industry?
Clayton Wood: I would say look carefully at, I mean there's, there's two I would say the two things to look at in, in the, in food automation specifically, there are, there's some really cool technology doing some advanced things with food and, and that's always good, you know, if you, but advanced technology, as we all know isn't, isn't enough to make a good business look hard at, at what business choices the, the company's making and, and you know, choose a company that's got a smart business plan. We see, you know, there's a graveyard of companies that have started in this industry and then failed because they, they weren't, they didn't make the right choices about what, how to go to business, how much challenge to take on, who to sell to, how to sell.
Elisa Muñoz: Amazing. Thank you so much Clayton for being here, for sharing your advice, and experiences with us.
Clayton Wood: Absolutely, it's been fun.
