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START WITH DOUBT
Massimo Bucolo (46), a former medical equipment salesman who turned pizza entrepreneur, is confident his customers will love it. Bucolo installed his automated pizza vending machine in a busy neighborhood on Catania Street, near Piazza Bologna, Rome. He named it Mr. Go, and the machine can produce 100 pizzas at a time. It offers four different types of pizza: Margherita pizza, four-cheese pizza, spicy sausage pizza, and bacon pizza. Remarkably, Mr. Go only takes three minutes to produce a fresh pizza.
He hopes the machine will soon become popular with people, especially after work when traditional pizza shops close or some of the smaller, less reputable eateries are open. "I'm not trying to compete with pizza shops, I just want to offer a new solution," Bucolo said.
Renzo Panattoni, owner of one of Rome's oldest pizza shops, believes that pizzas from vending machines "don't resemble traditional pizza at all." He insists that locals will remain loyal to his thin-crust pizza – the shop's best-selling item since 1931 – even though the thicker-crust Neapolitan pizza has recently become quite popular in the city.
Even many culinary experts and food bloggers have expressed skepticism and criticized Bucolo's idea of an automatic pizza vending machine.
"Creating curiosity is one of the things I aim for."
Customers can observe the machine in operation through the glass windows. The process includes mixing, kneading the dough, shaping it into discs, adding the filling, baking it in an infrared oven, and finally packaging it in a cardboard box.
Mr. Bucolo said: “Curiosity is one of the things I aim for, as people enjoy watching the process of making a pizza. Furthermore, because it’s cheaper than usual, it’s easy for people to buy it regularly or to try it out.” A Margherita pizza costs 4.50 EUR, while the most expensive one, the four-cheese pizza, is only 6 EUR.
Maurizio Pietrangelon, a customer, commented that buying pizza from a machine was quite convenient. “The pizzas made by the machine are more or less tastier than the frozen ones in the supermarket,” he added before wishing Mr. Bucolo good luck and leaving with his pizza in hand.
Virginia Pitorri, a regular customer of the automatic pizza vending machine since its launch, shared that she frequents it because her young daughter has been fascinated by the experience of buying pizza since her first time: "She loves watching the machine and finds it very enjoyable."
However, Marco Bolasco, a renowned Italian food journalist, was more critical in his assessment of this new automated pizza model. He said, "While interesting, for Italians, this is probably not really pizza."
Despite the mixed reviews, Mr. Bucolo's pizza vending machine has at least achieved one of its goals: attracting people's curiosity. The creator of Mr. Go, however, expressed hope that after the initial curiosity subsides, customers will return because of the quality of the pizza. Another plus is that the machine operates 24/7, and Mr. Bucolo hopes it can serve those working night shifts, such as taxi drivers.
Additional information
In fact, Mr. Go is not the only automatic pizza vending machine on the market. The first pizza machine was the creation of Claudio Torghele, a businessman from Northern Italy, who researched and collaborated with the company Let's Pizza to launch the machine in 2009.
Even Torghele was quite surprised by Bucolo's move to install a machine in a city already full of pizza parlors. "I never imagined there would be an automatic pizza machine in Rome," Torghele said.
