CHARLOTTE, N.C. + SEATTLE, WA. – Chartwells Higher Education, a recognized leader in contract food service management, today announced a partnership with Picnic, a food automation company. Chartwells and Picnic are the first to bring the world’s first pizza assembly station to a college campus dining facility, helping Texas A&M Dining reduce food waste while using cost-effective technology to create pizzas on campus.
Through Picnic, Chartwells is able to not only provide more efficient and timely service to guests, but also reduce potential food and product waste by 80%. In addition, Chartwells gets to bring Texas A&M students a truly unique dining experience and one that’s never been seen before on a college campus.
“Picnic is incredibly happy to be partnering with Texas A&M as the first university to deploy the Picnic Pizza Station. As a former student, it makes it even nicer to see our station at home in Aggieland,” said Clayton Wood ‘80, CEO of Picnic. “Bringing the Picnic Pizza Station to Texas A&M is the first step of many innovations to come.”
The Picnic Pizza Station is autonomous and completely customizable for each order – after loading the dough, the Picnic station takes care of applying the sauce, cheese, fresh-cut pepperoni, and additional toppings. The finished pizzas are then loaded into the kitchen’s ovens for cooking. Each hour, the Picnic station can assemble up to 100 pizzas that serve 400 people. The Picnic Pizza Station is a labor-saving kitchen essential that increases productivity, decreases food waste, and improves food handling and safety.
“We’ve seen a significant increase in efficiency with the Picnic Pizza Station. What used to take three people now only requires one which allows us to free people up to do other critical duties in the kitchen,” says Marc Cruz, Chartwells Higher Education’s District Executive Chef.
To learn more about the Picnic Pizza Station visit hellopicnic.com. To see how Chartwells is bringing innovative dining options to millions of students nationwide, visit http://chartwellshighered.com/.
About Chartwells Higher Education
Chartwells is the recognized leader in contract food service management, hospitality, and award-winning guest service within over 300 college and university dining environments throughout academic institutions across the U.S. Chartwells’ nutritious cuisine not only satisfies the unique appetites, lifestyles, and dietary needs of every guest dining on campus, but it also brings people together to promote the high-intensity relationships that will prepare students for the future. For more information, visit www.ChartwellsHigherEd.com, www.ChartwellsMonthly.com, www.DineonCampus.com.
About Picnic
Founded in 2016, Picnic (hellopicnic.com) has collected an experienced team of food and technology industry veterans to develop and provide specialized intelligent technology and solutions for the food service and hospitality industries. Restaurants, convenience and grocery stores, university and corporate campuses, casinos, hotels, cruise lines, sports venues, catering groups, healthcare cafeterias, small kiosks, ghost kitchen operators, mobile food operations, food trucks, delivery, and military sites are among the many segments poised to benefit from the company’s automated food assembly platform integrating robotics, software, cloud, and deep learning technology.
Picnic continues to receive high profile recognition including the National Restaurant Association “Kitchen Innovations 2021 Award,” GeekWire 2021 finalist for “Hardware/Gadget/Robotics of the Year,” inclusion in “The FoodTech 500 2020” by Forward Fooding and selected for the “Foodservice Robotics Pioneer Award” at Spain’s Expo HIP 2020, and “Best of CES 2020.”
