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  Quattro Stagioni in Three Minutes?: Italian Pizza Makers Deride New Vending Machine

Quattro Stagioni in Three Minutes? Italian Pizza Makers Deride New Vending Machine

News that an Italian businessman has invented a vending machine for fresh pizza has caused nothing but scorn among the nation's pizza makers. According to the Association of Italian Pizzerias, the product that the machine dispenses has nothing to do with real pizza.

Consisting of dough, tomato sauce and toppings, it may look like and even smell like a pizza, but to Italy's pizza makers, the product that comes out of a new vending machine is definitely not la cosa vera.

Pino Morelli, head of the Association of Italian Pizzerias (API), poured scorn on the invention of the first automatic vending machine for fresh pizza. "Something that comes out of an automatic machine has nothing to do with Italian pizza," he told Italy's ANSA news agency on Monday.

The object of Morelli's derision is the "Let's Pizza" machine, created by Italian businessman Claudio Torghele. The machine cooks pizza in just three minutes, from beating the flour and water into dough, stretching the mixture into a disc and then adding tomato sauce and other ingredients. The pizza is then lifted into an infrared oven before emerging onto a cardboard tray.

Torghele told the New York Times that customers can peer through little windows to see how their pizza is progressing and the final product will cost as little as €3.50 ($4.50). He said he got his idea while working in California in the mid-1990s. "At food courts I saw a trend toward vending machines," he said. "In fast food, I saw pizza everywhere." He put the two together, got some backing from a Dutch investment company, and set to work developing the machine which is set to debut in Italy and neighboring countries this summer.

Morelli of the API is not convinced the Italian public will be flocking to get their pizzas from a machine, arguing that the art of Italian pizza-making is not something that can be so easily automated.

"The craft of the pizza maker has been rediscovered and the number of people wanting to learn the art of the pizza is growing," he told ANSA.

"It's a reliable and well-paid craft," Morelli said, noting that professional pizza-making courses have seen a 25 percent increase in uptake this year and that practitioners of the art can earn up to €7,000 a month in places like Australia.

His only concern is that automated pizza manufacturing could somehow tarnish Italy's culinary image. "The pizza is the symbol of the 'Made in Italy' brand and we should let it live and prosper in peace."

-- smd