The News

• Foodservice operator Chartwells Higher Education announced yesterday that it has partnered Picnic to bring that startup’s pizza assembling robot to Texas A&M University.

• Picnic says its pizza ‘bot can top 100 pizzas per hour and reduce product waste by 80 percent.

• Picnic’s robot is already up and running at A&M, and this is the first university deployment of Picnic’s pizza robot.

The Story

If there’s any locale that should have a pizza making robot — it’s a college campus (or does that just show my age? College kids probably have a more refined palate nowadays.).

Given Texas A&M has more than 72,000 students, it could probably use a little robotic help in the cafeteria. Picnic’s modular pizza assembly robot layers on sauce, cheese and other toppings (depending on how many modules are installed), and can automatically assemble 100 pizzas per hour.

While feeding students during finals weeks is important to us here at OttOmate, we’re actually more interested in the fact that this is Picnic’s first foray into higher education.