I think it's even narrower than that. Mobile pizza robots. Since non mobile ones surely already exist in the frozen pizza world.

They seem to have been solving for a delivered pizza that's maybe 10 minutes more fresh. I don't think there's much value there.

The way to do automated pizza is to miniaturize and streamline like what Wozniak was great at doing at Apple. Retain the storefront and physical location. Push the storefront to be more community driven as an open plan restaurant and pickup location. Develop tech to generalize automated food prep and inventory storage. Build up from the basics engineering disciplines for a fully custom assembly pipeline.

You don't want to lose the place in the community or the accountability of having humans to hold responsible for your food. A storefront can carry that. I don't understand buying a robot arm and calling it a day. Or cooking pizzas in black-box trucks that may arise suspicion in their cleanliness or quality. Being able to see your food being made adds a lot.

How you do all that and compete with the big dogs is an interesting question.

I typically only see 2 or 3 people manning a Little Caesar's. I don't know how much cheaper a robot could make an operation like that.

Here's an actual work schedule: http://i.imgur.com/ukj47cs.jpg

You're not really building a robot, instead filling in the line between already automated sequences like the oven and chiller. Costco has a saucing mechanism, the biggest transformations are storing delivered inventory, managing dough proofing, topping pizzas accurately and self-cleaning. Cutting, boxing, delivering and taking orders is all straightforward.

I know what a schedule looks like, I used to make them for some of the busiest pizza shops out there. Shops next to universities and large business districts are the easiest to make the financial savings argument. The shops that benefit from a 24/7 model can make savings and increase throughput. Delivering on-time and without error can be massively improved. Making a cost reduction on the huge amounts of tiny shops out there is a great place to prove the tech financially, not where you'll see the most dramatic impact.

There is another automated pizza startup out there that has taken big frozen pizza factory tech and shrunk it down to retail size. It's not the right answer either. That tech makes too much sacrifice in accuracy, flexibility and quality for quantity.

There are more factors that go into this, maybe something better pursued elsewhere than discussed here.