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Picnic, a Seattle-based startup that raised more than $53 million to develop robots capable of putting human restaurant workers out of a job — even partnering with the giant pizza chain Domino’s — has shut down.
The startup liquidated all of its assets after becoming insolvent, according to legal documents obtained by GeekWire. All its intellectual property has been sold off to an unnamed buyer.
The collapse highlights the tech industry’s struggles to automate labor in the food industry. Despite countless startups attempting to built robots designed to put hospitality workers out of a job, the tasks keeps proving trickier than anticipated, echoing similar woes plaguing other labor-intensive sectors as well.
The startup’s Picnic Pizza Station, which was intended to allow a single worker to push out 100 12-inch pizzas in a single hour by robotically distributing pizza toppings, made a big splash in 2022 when the company announced a partnership with Domino’s.
The goal of a setup that allows one worker to do the work of a whole kitchen seems pretty obvious. But instead of advertising the collaboration as a way to reduce headcount, Domino’s claimed at the time that it was looking to rapidly grow its global workforce through a robot-facilitated expansion into new markets.
But warning signs soon became apparent. In 2023, Picnic was forced to lay off employees, citing the “current economic environment,” and its CEO Clayton Wood departed. His successor, Michael Bridges, left two years later as well.
It’s not the first robotics company to fail at automating pizza making. In 2023, a robot pizza startup called Zume Pizza shut down after raising almost half a billion dollars. The firm struggled for years with nagging technical issues, such as keeping melting cheese from sliding off pies that were being baked inside its moving trucks.
Meanwhile, Picnic’s most ardent supporters will now have to contend with idle robots cluttering their restaurants. Seattle-based pizza chef Lee Kindell, who owns a chain of restaurants in the city powered by the company’s tech, told GeekWire that he’s now stuck holding a $250,000 “robot aquarium” of useless machines.
“I was so pissed I started my own robot company,” he told the publication.
More on pizza robots: Robot Pizza Startup Shuts Down After Cheese Kept Sliding Off
