GOPIZZA, a brand of brick oven pizza for a single person, was launched with the goal of becoming the McDonald's of pizza industry, starting its business in 2016 with a food truck in Yeouido. After its rollout of offline stores, the company applied various technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and robots to the kitchen, streamlining the kitchen to make it easier for humans to work and maintain uniform product quality. The company also targeted overseas markets such as India, Singapore, and Hong Kong from the very beginning of its business to overcome the scale limitations that the domestic (Korean) market has.
Let’s look inside of one pizzeria’s kitchen. There's a lot of work to be done-forming dough, adding toppings, and baking pizzas-but only one employee. She's only been on the job for a month, but she's making pizzas like a pro. You place the parbaked handmade pizza dough on the toppings table and the AI tells you which ingredients to add and how much. Once the toppings are done, the pizza goes into an automated, conveyor belt -type oven. It just takes three minutes to bake a pizza. There's no need for a human to shovel the pizza through the oven to evenly distribute the heat like a traditional oven, and it's more than twice as fast as the ovens used by other franchises. When the pizza is done, a robotic arm cuts the pizza, applies the adequate sauce for that pizza, and moves it to a warming station so it doesn't get cold while the other food is being prepared.
It sounds like something from a distant future, but this is happening in the kitchen of GOPIZZA, a brick oven pizza franchise brand for a single person. As GOPIZZA rapidly expanded, the company actively developed food related technologies such as AI and robotics to ensure that quality was consistent. The company is developing automation solutions for kitchens and IoT solutions for store management to ensure consistent and efficient management of tasks in franchise stores that used to rely on human instinct.
Though GOPIZZA has strong tech startup aspects, it actually started as a food truck. CEO Lim Jae-won, who was a young man at the time, craved for pizza on his way home from working overtime. He wished to have a pizza for one person, quickly served and simple to eat. It was from that moment he began to study pizza at a pizza restaurant during weekends with the goal of becoming the "McDonald's of Pizza Industry," realizing the difficulties for pizza to become fast food. The biggest obstacle was time, for it took a long time to bake a pizza. He found the technological breakthrough to be like McDonald’s. For fast-served pizza, he developed automatic ovens and parbaked dough to make pizza quickly, and AI smart topping tables and collaborative robot, so called ‘GOBOT Stations’ to maintain quality.
This content was translated into English by AI (using DeepL) from an article that was originally written in Korean in the DBR (Donga Business Review). Therefore, please understand that there may be some awkward expressions.
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