The following interview is a conversation we had with Clayton Wood, CEO of Picnic, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $30 Million Raised to Automate Pizza Making
Clayton Wood
Thanks so much, Brad. It’s great to be here.
Brett
Yeah, no problem. So before begin talking about what you’re building there, can we just start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background?
Clayton Wood
Absolutely. So I’ve been the CEO at Picnic for a little over four years. I’m not technically the founder, but I joined early in the company’s life when the founder departed. My prior career started in building technology, several years in aerospace at Honeywell, and then I’ve been doing startups for the last 15 years. So in little of everything, I’m kind of industry agnostic, done a little renewable energy, some nonprofit, some precision agriculture, and now Picnic. I think the common thread is a lot of hardware, a lot of engineering problems. I’m a mechanical engineer by training, but I like to solve real world problems that have a real impact on people’s lives.
Brett
Nice. I love it. Now, two questions we’d like to ask just to better understand what makes you tick as a leader. First one is, what co do you admire the most and what do you admire about them?
Clayton Wood
Maybe a little cliche answer. I go back to Steve Jobs and to me, where Steve Jobs is really admirable. It’s the early days where he had a vision of what the product could before it existed in the world and before anybody knew to ask for it. And he was able to be true to that vision and be ruthless in executing to that. One of the ways I see a core characteristic of an entrepreneur is to be relentlessly resourceful, and you have to overcome lots of barriers and hurdles and obstacles along the way. He certainly did that, leaving his company, coming back, but still being true to that vision of what the best possible version of what his company and what his products could be. And I think that’s just great.
Brett
Yeah, I love that, especially for you. Coming from the hardware side, I’m sure makes sense for him to be inspirational. It’s truly just mind blowing how good Apple products are. I’m a fanatic. I think everything Apple, and it’s just crazy to me how high quality everything is and how just amazing the products are. It’s really incredible.
Clayton Wood
No, it’s a pleasure to use them, and we’ve actually used Apple kind of as an internal benchmark. That’s a company we aspire to be compared to when we’ve done our design work and what we want to be. We want to aim as high as we can aim and we think that’s pretty d*** high.
Brett
Nice. Yeah, I feel like there’s nothing higher than that, so I love it.
Clayton Wood
What about books?
Brett
Is there a specific book that’s had a major impact on you as a founder? And this can be a business book or just a personal book that influenced how you view the world?
Clayton Wood
I think specifically in the startup realm, my favorite book is a book called Founders at Work. It’s kind of an older book. It’s a compendium of founder stories. A lot of them are back from the 90s, some of the.com boom companies like Yahoo and PayPal. And it’s really just telling the founder stories and it humanizes the start of those companies. It’s easy to think of those companies as huge. It’s easy to think of the founders as being really rich and successful. Well, you go back to the beginning, you’ve got people who aren’t leaving their jobs, they’re doing work at night, they’re not sure if it’s going to work. And just the uncertainty and the hardships and the faith that you have to have working on a startup at that very early seminal stage. It’s really inspirational to see that every company that started out and became really big probably went through some version of those early days and it’s really inspirational to read those stories.
Brett
Nice. I love that. I’ve not read that book yet, but I’ll add it to my list now. Now let’s switch gears and let’s dive deeper into picnic. So I know you mentioned there you’re not the founder, but you were there early on. So I’m sure you’re very familiar with the origin story. So can you take us back and just tell us a bit more about the background and the early days of the company?
Clayton Wood
Yeah, so the company was really started the group of automation engineers, people with some robotics background and robotics interests, multidisciplinary engineering group, looking for a good place. What’s a good business to build with automation. And what they realized was food service seems like a good industry to be working in. Those jobs are difficult, tedious, sometimes dangerous, usually unpleasant, low, bad working additions and just a good place to apply automation. So they thought, well, let’s automate pizza. And so the initial idea was let’s make a self contained pizza truck that does everything. You walk up inside of it and you order a pizza and everything happens inside the truck. And when they thought that sounds like a good idea and then they realized, well, that’s probably pretty ambitious, maybe we just figure out how to make a pizza first, then we’ll worry about the truck part and realize that actually is pretty hard.
Clayton Wood
We’ve got some videos of the early prototypes that are kind of comical, that are just harder than it looks to actually distribute sauce and cheese and toppings onto a pizza and to do it repeatedly and reliably. And so starting with that beginning just worked on how do you solve that problem. And we’ve always focused on being very customer centric, where the idea being we want this to improve the user’s life, improve the user’s business and our approach, the way our product works. We’re making pizza but we’re not doing everything making a pizza. So we’re not doing ingredient prep and we’re not doing cooking. What we’re really focused on is building the pizza, putting the sauce and the cheese and the pepperoni fresh sliced off the stick and any other toppings that you want onto the pizza and the right quantity and the right pattern and producing a ready to cook pizza.
Clayton Wood
And it turns out that’s where the real challenge is in the business and that’s where we’re focused and it enables us to make anybody’s pizza.
Brett
And at the start of the call or in the pre interview, were joking that I was going to introduce you as a pizza tech company. I know it’s much bigger than that. What category do you place yourself in and how do you think about your market category?
Clayton Wood
It’s a great question. The whole space of food preparation automation is a nascent industry. There really isn’t much in that field. There certainly wasn’t when I started four years ago. I remember early on looking at a technology roadmap of who are all our landscape map, who are all the companies in food tech or restaurant tech? And there were about 200 companies listed at the time and there were less than ten that were actually touching food. It’s like, okay, this is an industry that the whole purpose of the industry is to prepare and serve food. And all these technology solutions are not actually doing anything with food. The reason is touching and dealing with food is hard. And historically there has been industrial food processing factories, big machines producing packaged food. And at the kitchen scale there are appliances, little tools, power tools that people use, food processors, mixers, that sort of thing.
Clayton Wood
But in terms of actual automation that does a multi step process to prepare a dish at a restaurant scale, almost nothing existed four years ago. And so it’s a whole new category. We used to say food tech and then alternative proteins came in and kind of stole that thunder there’s. Food tech, restaurant tech, restaurant automation, pizza tech works. It’s a new category. And that’s one of the challenges is explaining what the heck it is that we do.
Brett
And from reading the media or just consuming news. I remember a couple of years ago reading about a different pizza automation startup that was backed by SoftBank. I don’t know when that was. I would guess like 2019, 2020. And I believe the company didn’t work out and I think everyone likes to talk crap about SoftBank’s big bets. Do you have any thoughts on what happened with that company and where they may have gone wrong?
Clayton Wood
Absolutely, yeah. It was actually 2018. Their SoftBank funding came in, namely company is Zoom. It’s still around Z. Ume, and they raised money just before I started at Picnic. And so I initially saw them as the main competitor, the market leader. But what they were doing, one of their core ideas was to have these very high tech trucks that would drive around and cook food on the way to a customer versus cooking food in a restaurant, delivering it to a customer. And pizza was their first food because they were attached to an actual pizza restaurant called Zoom Pizza in the Bay Area. The difference between what we do and what they were doing at the time is they weren’t actually building the pizza with robots. They had robots in their operation. They had robots putting pizzas in ovens. And I think they had a vision of putting the robots on the trucks, but they actually had people building the pizzas for the most part.
Clayton Wood
And were actually building the pizza. I actually saw our offering was complementary to theirs because were doing the part of it that they weren’t doing. Unfortunately for them, I think they had a really big vision that was probably too broad and they had the curse of early funding, where they had so much funding, they had so many things to do, it became a real execution problem. And so they pivoted. After being unable to execute on the initial idea, they pivoted into compostable packaging, which was something they had picked up along the way. Thinking about a compostable pizza box and last I saw them, they were making compostable packaging and COVID masks. So they’ve been out of the food automation space for several years now.
Brett
And having a big kind of public blow up like that, for someone who’s pretty close to what you guys are doing, or somewhat close to what you’re doing, did that hurt your fundraising efforts at all? And did that taint what you’re trying to build in any way? Or were you able to communicate how it’s very different and it shouldn’t really impact how people view this category?
Clayton Wood
No, it absolutely had a big impact because early on, again, it’s a new category. There wasn’t a category of investors looking to invest in food automation startups. So the few investors that were interested, many of them had invested in Zoom and a few of the other pioneering companies at that time. Most of those companies did not succeed for a variety of reasons. And so we ran into a lot of people who were a little gun shy because of the early failures. And so it kind of tainted the category for a while. But again, the structural disadvantage in the investment market is just new and different. It’s not B. Two B, SaaS? So there’s not 1000 investors out there who say that’s what they invest in. And there’s a cliche that hardware is hard. And I would add that automation is a hard version of hardware.
Clayton Wood
And if you do food automation I used to tell my team we’re doing the Olympics of hardware development because this is one of the hardest automation things you can do is to try to manipulate food which is highly variable into a very consistent output. So we’re taking on a really high hard problem and again, it’s not one that there’s a lot of track record of a lot of companies out there being successful. So investors get gunshy because they haven’t seen success. They’ve got to see the vision and understand what this could be.
Brett
And I’m sure there’s a very obvious answer to this question but why pizza? I’m sure that this technology could work in different food categories. What’s the reason to start with pizza?
Clayton Wood
First reason is pizza is probably the most popular food in the planet. At least every continent. We’ve had interest on every continent in our pizza technology. It’s also relatively simple in concept. You’re basically putting some different kinds of foods on a pizza dough. But it’s also highly variable where there’s lots of different kinds of pizza. And one of the choices that we made early on which is different than some of the competitors in our space is at this point in our history we’ve made over 120,000 pizzas, or rather I should say our customers have made over 120,000 pizzas but we’ve never sold a pizza. We are not in the pizza business. We don’t want to be in the pizza business. We’re not a restaurant. Many, many of our competitors have developed very sophisticated technology for food preparation and then they open a restaurant and they say okay, we’re now we’re going to sell our automated food.
Clayton Wood
Which never made sense to me as a business choice and we had that choice early on and we issued it because as popular as pizza is, if we’re making pizza and selling it regardless of how good that pizza is, that’s one type of pizza. And people like lots of different kinds of pizza and the market narrows if you’re selling pizza to only the people who like your pizza. Let’s say it’s neapolitan with certain toppings. People who like dish won’t buy your pizza. Where we are selling to operators, anybody who makes pizza. And the architecture of our system is such that we can make any pizza. And that ranges from a Domino’s pizza where we demonstrated with Domino’s in Berlin this summer to our local Seattle customer called Moto that makes a gourmet deep dish Detroit style pizza with ingredients like Dungeonous crab and pork belly or a stadium pizza or a college pizza.
Clayton Wood
Any kind of pizza you want. We make any pizza. And so the market is really the world of pizza makers so it’s an enormous market opportunity for us, and we think it’s the best approach for the business.
Brett
And are you just a pizza connoisseur now? Do you know everything there is to know about pizza? Do you force your family and yourself to eat pizza every night?
Clayton Wood
I know a lot more about pizza than I did four years ago. And we learned a lot about pizza toppings and the challenges of the food supply chain, the challenges of cold chain handling for things like cheese. Yeah, we eat a lot of pizza, and in the office, a lot of pizza gets made. A lot of pizza gets eaten, a lot of pizza gets donated to charity from the office. People always ask if we get tired of it, and no, we don’t. We make a pretty good pizza and everybody continues to enjoy it, nobody’s sick of it, and the office always smells pretty good.
Brett
Nice. I can imagine. Now, a couple of things that I want to ask about, just from things that I read on the website. So on the website it mentions that one single employee can create 130 oven ready pizzas within an hour. So if they weren’t using your hardware or your machines, how many pizzas could a single worker create just on their own without the machine?
Clayton Wood
Yeah. So this is where it gets interesting, trying to explain to the market and trying to understand where customers are. There’s a wide variation of the types of pizzas. There’s a wide variation in types of people who are making pizza. So an industry standard benchmark is that an experienced pizza worker, somebody who’s really very competent at their job, should be able to make a pizza in about 45 seconds. So that’s probably roughly, let’s say, 80 pizzas an hour if they’re working continuously. The reality is that the industry, just like every other part of the food service industry, suffers from a chronic labor shortage. It’s been true before the pandemic. It’s much worse since the pandemic. And so every pizza maker is short of labor, has high turnover, and therefore has inexperienced workers making the pizza. And that leads to a couple of key problems. First is they’re slow.
Clayton Wood
We’ve heard some customers tell us that it takes their pizza makers who are inexperienced two or three minutes to put all the pepperoni slices on a large pizza. That’s pretty slow, and that takes a lot of time and it’s very tedious. Second thing that happens is inexperienced pizza workers, when they’re in a hurry, they’re very inconsistent. You can give them measuring cups and training, but if they’re in a hurry, some of those processes go out the window and they don’t make the same pizza twice. And that’s a problem if you’ve got a brand identity based on the recipe and your workers can’t make the pizza to the recipe. And the third problem is food waste. The inexperienced worker will tend to waste food, especially cheese. Cheese is the most plentiful ingredient on the pizza and it’s also the most expensive. And if you’re inexperienced, you put some cheese on, then it’s like, well, just a little more and I see a spot there and pretty soon you’ve put way too much cheese on the pizza.
Clayton Wood
You don’t know it. The pizza doesn’t cook the same, it doesn’t cook properly because it’s got too much cheese on it. It wastes a lot of money and it’s no longer the recipe. So we have a local customer here in Seattle who upon using our system for about a month, told us they were saving $700 a week just in cheese savings alone. And they’re not a very big shop, we know from some of our larger university customers they’re saving cases of cheese. So it’s just the food waste savings alone can pay for the system, but that worker problem is huge. So going back to the throughput though, 130 pizzas an hour really enables you to get through a rush hour. The shape of the curve on a pizza restaurant is 230 in the afternoon, nobody’s ordering any pizza. 08:00 on Friday night. You need as many ovens and as many hands making pizza as you can get.
Clayton Wood
And the scheduling problem for an operator is, how do you schedule a shift for 3 hours of a rush hour on a Friday night and not have anybody working on Tuesday afternoon? So there’s a scheduling problem, there’s a cost problem with staffing up. We talked to some small shops that have 14 people in the kitchen on a busy Friday night and they can’t even move around, there’s so many people there. So there’s this huge problem of trying to do that with automation. You can smoothly cruise through that rush period, you can make as many pizzas as you need, as fast as you need, and you don’t need to add staff to do it. And every pizza you make is highly consistent, high quality. We know it’s high quality. We’ve done blind taste tests at some of our university clients where the students clearly prefer the picnic made pizza to the person made pizza because it’s consistent and it’s to the recipe.
Clayton Wood
So if you can make high quality, consistent pizza to the recipe without adding staff in your rush hour, and you cruise through that rush hour without a hassle, without a management problem, and you’re making more pizza per hour, which you know what that means. You dial up a pizza on a Friday night and you want it delivered and it says it’ll take 90 minutes to get there, you’re probably going to go to the next place and see if you can get it inside an hour. The more pizzas you can produce in an hour, the more sales you’re going to have in that hour, you’re not going to lose those sales. So for lots of reasons, you can be really productive when you’ve got a high speed, high quality, consistent means of making pizza.
Brett
And one thing you said there that I want to zoom in on, because I think it’s really important to talk about there is the food waste side. So it says that it’s less than 2% food waste when they’re using picnic. Do you have a rough number of what it typically is, like, what that typical percentage is without picnic?
Clayton Wood
Yeah, the industry average is ten to 12%. So that really adds up. We figure on a typical pizza restaurant that is wasting ten to 12% of their food versus picnic, that delta not only is a huge amount of money that they’re spending that they shouldn’t be spending, hurts the business, hurts the bottom line, hurts the quality of the product. It’s also a big carbon footprint issue. I think the last number I saw was 35 metric tons of carbon is what that difference over the course of a year makes that waste difference? Because that food production has a carbon footprint, and if you can reduce that food waste, you can have a sustainability impact with your business as well as make more money.
Brett
Wow. In that Seattle pizza company that you mentioned there, that was saving, I believe you said $700 per week, is that just one location?
Clayton Wood
That’s right, that’s right, one location, $700 a week.
Brett
Wow. That’s insane. So this has to be very meaningful to these pizza shops. And I’m guessing it’s not like they’re just printing cash and making millions and millions of dollars for a year, I’m guessing. So being able to save $700 a week just with this one change has to be almost a no brainer, I’m sure, once it’s explained. So what do you think that issue is when you’re selling this? What holds people back from buying? Because it does seem so obvious from a non pizza owner perspective when I’m listening to you here.
Clayton Wood
Yeah, it’s a classic technology adoption challenge where this technology has not existed before. People have never seen it. They don’t know how to think about it. I call it the spaceship and a cornfield problem. People are like, what is that? How much did it cost? I don’t know. Have you ever seen one? I don’t know. How does it work? We have people at trade shows looking at it. They’re watching it make pizza, and they’re chalking their head and they’re saying, but how does it cook the pizza in where it doesn’t cook the pizza? It’s just the similar pizza. It’s such a new concept, so people have to get their head around that. Also, pizza shops are relatively small. Our system takes up a certain amount of space. It’s not very big, but nobody is sitting around with a picnic pizza station sized hole in their kitchen.
Clayton Wood
They’re just waiting for it to move in. So if you’re the customer, you got to make some adjustments in the way you operate, in the way you’re set up, in the way your kitchen is arranged we aspire to make anybody’s pizza. So we’re constantly expanding the ingredients. We can handle about 20 different kinds of cheese, lots of different kinds of other toppings, lots of different sauces. But sometimes there’s some adjustments that may need to be made to accommodate the automation just like any other adjustment you’d make. And so people have to get their head around those adjustments to reap the benefit. And over time our system is going to be more versatile. People will become more accustomed to it. One of the best segments for us is operators who are expanding or are opening new operations. Even existing brands are considering opening like new branded lines of their business that are more high tech.
Clayton Wood
You’ll see this across the food industry, all kinds of fast casual foods. Food brands are redesigning their stores for drive through and pickup where dine in isn’t as popular. So part of that trend is people are seeing that, okay, I want to open 100 new stores next year. But the idea of doing the old brick and mortar hire 20 people, just the old routine, nobody wants to face that anymore. So they’re considering new options. And if they can build their new concept around automation where it’s built in from the start, it works well for them. And we’ve got a customer in New Jersey who is probably our highest volume customer. They’re making thousands of pizzas a week. And they’ve really started from the beginning, from the ground up to build an automation first pizza operation with all the tools they’re using. We have another customer in San Diego, Andrew Simmons at Mama Ramona’s.
Clayton Wood
He’s got an ongoing thread on LinkedIn where he’s building in public. He’s saying, these are the tools I’m using, these are the results I’m getting. Picnic is a key part of his operation along with his POS and his ovens and other parts. And he’s coming up with all kinds of innovative business ideas on top of the fact that what the automation enables him to do that he couldn’t do using conventional methods.
Brett
So I’m guessing a lot of these customers where you’re seeing demand is coming from, I don’t know what you’d call them, but I would guess they’re on the younger side or technology first business owners. It’s not the older gentleman who moved here 80 years ago from Italy. So I’m guessing that person is probably very stuck in their old ways and may not believe that automation can create a good pizza. Is that fair to say that there’s part of the market like that?
Clayton Wood
I was still clear of the identity politics in there and I’ll just say that one of the things we look at is if you’re an operator and you live through the pandemic, did you have to change your operation in the pandemic to adapt to the new conditions? Or did you just try to hang on with white knuckles to the way you were doing things before and try to gut it out. The people who tried to gut it out are probably not our customer. The people who readily changed and found new ways to operate during the pandemic, those are probably our customer. And it’s a classic technology adoption curve. You got your innovators and early adopters are going to be the first ones and you see them in all kinds of unlikely places. You see this in large corporations, large brands. Some brands are really nimble and progressive and practical and want to dive in and start learning.
Clayton Wood
Other brands get stuck in their own bureaucracy and their own arrogance of how they do it. And they’re interested, but they’re not really ready. They’re going to wait and see. You see the personalities of the companies and the ownership come out as you have the conversations with these customers.
Brett
Yeah, I can see that. And as I’m sure you’ve experienced in this journey, bringing innovative tech is not easy to do. And I’m sure that there’s a very long list of challenges that you’ve faced so far. If we had to pick your top challenge, what would you say that challenge has been and how do you overcome it?
Clayton Wood
I think the main challenge is that technology adoption problem. How do you persuade people to make a small adjustment, to get a big benefit? And when you’ve got a vast market, it’s kind of a cursive success problem. When your product is arguably applicable to almost anybody who makes pizza, how do you narrow that market and your focus so that you’re trying to find the customers in that sea? Who are the most likely to buy soon, who can buy exactly what you’ve got and who are receptive to buying what you’ve got and trying to do that narrowing of the market and stay focused on that. We’ve stayed focused on pizza. You asked about other foods earlier. Our technology could be adapted to other foods sandwiches, salads, tacos, any food where you put a food on a base, a bowl, any of those things. We could do that.
Clayton Wood
We’ve stayed focused on pizza because it’s our area of focus. Beyond pizza, we have to focus on who are the customers, who can benefit most from the product, who are ready to buy it, and who are really ready to buy the first version of the product, which is the one that’s in production now and not some future version that doesn’t exist yet. So I think that whole technology adoption problem is core to our success. And we’ve lived through some long buying cycles, but what we’ve seen is tons of interest and we’ve learned a ton. And 2023 is shaping up to be a breakout year for us.
Brett
Nice. Very exciting. And I’m sure that this comes up in conversations with investors and if it hasn’t come up yet, I’m sure it’ll come up with the media. But how do you navigate the conversation around automation that displaces workers? I know. You had mentioned there that there’s a job shortage. So I’m sure that helps part of that conversation. But I think when I looked online, it said there were, like, 800,000 people who work in the pizza industry in America, which is a pretty large number. I don’t know if that’s totally accurate, but that’s what I was able to find. So how do you view displacement of these workers, and how are you navigating those conversations?
Clayton Wood
Yeah, it’s a great question. It’s a concern I had early on when I joined. Are we solving a problem? Are we creating a problem? What I realized quickly was, before the Pandemic, National Restaurant Association was reporting 800,000 unfilled food service jobs in America, and then it was forecasted to go to 1.5 million by 2025. It’s 2023. It’s already 1.5 million. Because of the Pandemic, every pizza restaurant we’ve ever spoken to has a labor shortage. Every pizza restaurant we’ve ever spoken to has a turnover challenge. So what I like to say is we’re not replacing jobs. We’re replacing job openings. We’re enabling the operator to be successful and profitable with a smaller crew and improving the working conditions for the workers so they’ve got a more pleasant, easier job to do and everybody can have a better experience. The nature of food service work. Here again, National Restaurant Association reports the average tenure of a food service worker is about seven weeks, which is kind of astounding.
Clayton Wood
But when you think about it, the reason for that is entry level food service jobs. There’s usually no advancement, low pay, poor working additions. And so it’s not unusual for people to take a job, work for a while, just walk out, take a vacation for a couple of weeks, then go back, go get another job. There’s always another job. The next job is probably just the same as the last one. And so this turnover problem is a huge problem for the operators because they’ve got to hire and train, and once they got people trained, and then they quit. So there’s plenty of jobs for anyone who wants them. But the operators who are trying to operate businesses are suffering from this huge turnover problem. And we think automation improves the working conditions. It’ll reduce the turnover, and it will make the jobs better, and it’ll make the businesses more successful.
Clayton Wood
And the successful businesses we’re working with want to open new locations and so they can grow and create more jobs. So we really don’t believe we’re having any impact on anybody’s interest in getting a job making a pizza.
Brett
And last question I had on my list here to ask about in terms of ROI, is there a typical time period that you see it takes for a customer to see an ROI once they buy the machine?
Clayton Wood
Absolutely. So our business model, actually, we’ve set it up, we call it robotics as a service. So when an operator contracts to receive our equipment, there’s no money up front, we install the system or they set a 36 month term contract. We install the system, we provide training, service, support and upgrades within the fee, and they should save more money in the first month than the monthly payment. The ROI is instant for the operator and so there is no investment upfront and then a payback they install, change the way they’re operating and start being more successful and start saving money.
Brett
Well, so I’m guessing on your end then. That’s a super capital intensive business then, right? Because you need to pay up front for all the machines.
Clayton Wood
That’s right. So we have working capital financing on the back end. So our working capital financing, we finance all of our equipment, and then our debt service on that equipment is lower than our revenue. So we are also cash flow positive from the first month. And then beyond retiring that debt after 24 months, we have high margin recurring revenue off into the future. Because the life of the system is much longer than the life of the contract. And because our system is a first generation system and we expect we’re going to have better releases in the future, we don’t want customers waiting for the next generation’s next year’s model, so to speak. So we treat it like a cell phone contract. If you’ve got a 36 month contract, you’re 24 months into it and we have a new version of the system. You can trade in your system, upgrade, extend your contract.
Clayton Wood
We can take that original system back, refurbish it and reissue it back out to the market because it’s still totally suitable for service and it’s a win for everybody.
Brett
Wow, that’s super fascinating. You’re inspiring me here, Clayton. I want to open Brett’s Pizza shop now.
Clayton Wood
Well, good. Come on over, we’ll give you a demo and sign you up.
Brett
Sounds great. Now, last question here for you. I want to talk about the future a little bit so I know you touched on it, that there are other foods that you can use with the machines. Do you think that’s going to happen in the next three years or are you laser focused on the pizza market? I think the other number I read that blew my mind about the pizza market in the US. Is it’s like 45 billion in sales per year, which is mind blowing. Are you just going to try to get as much of that market as possible or are you eager to go into other types of food?
Clayton Wood
We’ve got our hands full with the pizza market for now, but I think it really won’t be that hard to move into other foods. The nature of our system is that it’s a conveyor system. So the dough goes in and it’s read by computer vision, and then each station that it passes, it gets sauce, cheese, fresh sliced pepperoni, other toppings. Because what we’re doing is we’re dosing a certain amount of food, and we’re distributing it on a base right now. That base is a pizza dough. That base could be a sandwich bun, it could be a salad bowl, it could be a plate, it could be a tortilla, it could be a pita bread. And because it’s station to station, and every pizza we make is customized size, shape and topping, so this is not batch processing of anything. So arguably, we could set up an assembly line where the first order is a pizza and the next one is a sandwich and the next order is a salad.
Clayton Wood
And they’re all going to get made at that same pace, 130 an hour at the current speeds. So the system architecture is quite powerful. We’re a startup, we’re a small company, so we’re focused on pizza, and the market is enormous. But as we get that market up and running, get that plate spinning, so to speak, we’re ready to branch out into other foods as well.
Brett
Amazing.
Clayton Wood
Super cool.
Brett
All right, Clayton, unfortunately, that’s all we’re going to have time to cover for today’s interview before we wrap. If people want to follow along with your journey as you continue to build this awesome company, where’s the best place for them to go?
Clayton Wood
Just follow our website picnicworks.com. We’re also on Twitter and LinkedIn. You can find those links on the website and fill out an information form. If you want information, we’d love to hear from you. Awesome.
Brett
Clayton, thank you so much for taking time to chat, talk about what you’re building and share this vision. This has been a blast, and I really look forward to having you back on in a couple of years to talk about everything that you’ve built out and done.
Clayton Wood
Thanks so much, Brett. It’s been a fun conversation.
Brett
All right, let’s keep in touch.
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