24-hour pizza vending machine Let’s Pizza launches in Italy

The fire-engine red machine has launched in office blocks and factories across Italy and makes fresh, hot pizza in three minutes flat.

And these are no frozen, cardboard pizzas either. Let’s Pizza kneads the dough, forms a round, adds tomato sauce and toppings, and then bakes it right before your eyes. All for €5. Torghele says, "This is not just a vending machine, it’s a mini-pizzeria. With the windows where you can watch the pizza being made, kids love it."

Torghele developed the machine at the University of Bologna and brought Let’s Pizza to market with the help of Unilever. Although the machine is currently only available in Italy, the Italian hopes to distribute his invention across Europe and then the US.

However, not everyone is impressed with Let’s Pizza. "This machine is a toy," says Pino Morelli of the Association of Italian Pizzerias. "Perhaps it will find a niche overseas, but Italians are born with pizza: their mothers feed it to them as babies. They understand it."

But Torghele isn’t fazed by the criticism: "If I want to eat a great pizza, I go to a pizzeria. But our product is satisfactory, low cost and available 24-hours a day," he says. "This is crisis proof. McDonald’s is increasing its sales. Low cost, fast food is in demand."Real Business bets this product would do astoundingly well on unversity campuses in Britain. And if fast food is a recession-proof niche, fast food franchises are even more cast-iron clad. So, if any of you lovely entrepreneurs want to bring the Let’s Pizza concept over here, feel free to send us a prototype!

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