Deus ex Machina: Can Robots Supercharge Pizza?

Restaurants and commercial kitchens have always faced challenges like staffing, inflation, food waste, and true costing. When the COVID pandemic hit, these and other issues were exacerbated and in many cases, spelled the end for many businesses. As we look to the future, both smaller restaurants and larger chains will need to deliver consistent quantity and quality in order to maintain their customer base. For some, the ability to pivot and think of new solutions has allowed them not only to stay afloat but to flourish in uncertain times. Can a modular, subscription-based, automated pizza robot transform the restaurant industry? In this new episode of FoodTech Junkies, we ask the CEO of Picnic, Clayton Wood, about what it means to reinvent the (pizza) wheel.

About Clayton Wood

Clayton Wood is CEO at Seattle-based Picnic Works and is responsible for overall development and growth for the company. Clayton’s passion as CEO is to build high performance teams and fully realize the financial and business potential of the company for all constituents. Clayton has served in key leadership positions in organizations ranging from startups to Fortune 100 organizations, across a variety of technology industries, including renewable energy, robotics and software. He has successfully taken companies from scratch to global publicly traded businesses or to successful acquisition. Prior to Picnic, Clayton served in C-suite positions as COO at IUNU, an award winning, venture-backed precision agriculture startup; CEO and President of Synapse Product Development; COO at Naverus; and COO/President at Xzeres Corp., a publicly traded global leader in small scale wind energy. Clayton spent 12 years at AlliedSignal and Honeywell where his roles included stewarding both the airborne radio and flight data recorder business units. Clayton holds a Master of Business Administration from the University of Washington, as well as Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Texas A&M.

About Picnic

Founded in 2016, Picnic (hellopicnic.com) has collected an experienced team of food and technology industry veterans to develop and provide specialized intelligent technology and solutions for the food service and hospitality industries. Restaurants, convenience and grocery stores, university and corporate campuses, casinos, hotels, cruise lines, sports venues, catering groups, healthcare cafeterias, small kiosks, ghost kitchen operators, mobile food operations, food trucks, delivery, and military sites are among the many segments poised to benefit from the company’s automated food assembly platform integrating RaaS, software, cloud, and deep learning technology. Picnic continues to receive high profile recognition including the National Restaurant Association “Kitchen Innovations 2021 Award,” GeekWire 2021 finalist for “Hardware/Gadget/Robotics of the Year,” inclusion in “The FoodTech 500 2020” by Forward Fooding and selected for the “Foodservice Robotics Pioneer Award” at Spain’s Expo HIP 2020, and “Best of CES 2020.”