Toyota, Pizza Hut Partner on Self-Baking Delivery Truck

Toyota Motor Corp. and Pizza Hut, which is owned by Yum! Brands Inc., have developed a concept truck that can autonomously bake pizzas during a delivery.

The partners demonstrated the technology in a specially equipped version of a Toyota Tundra pickup truck at this week’s Specialty Equipment Market Assn. show in Las Vegas. Both the truck and the pizza oven, which is mounted in the pickup bed, are powered by a hydrogen-fueled fuel cell stack adapted from the Mirai sedan.

The retrofitted pickup bed features a refrigerator, two computer-guided robotic arms and a portable conveyor oven. When a pizza is ordered, one of the robotic arms opens the refrigerator and removes the appropriate pizza from a group of pre-made pies.

The pizza is sent through the Tundra Pie Pro’s high-speed ventless oven. At the end of the conveyor, the second robotic arm moves the pie to a cutting board, divides it into six slices and places the finished pizza into a box. The whole process takes about seven minutes, according to the partners.

Toyota and Pizza Hut also cooperated on concept vehicle that was unveiled in January at the CES electronics show in Las Vegas. That concept used Toyota’s self-driving E-Pallete platform to deliver pre-cooked pizzas. Neither company has any immediate plans to publicly test or commercialize the delivery trucks.

Ford Motor Co. and Domino’s Pizza Inc. have tested self-driving pizza delivery vehicles in several U.S. cities over the last year. But the Toyota/Pizza Hut system is the first to autonomously prepare pizzas in the delivery vehicle.