Pizza Hut to show a pie-making robot in a Toyota at SEMA auto show in Las Vegas

Pizza Hut may be taking its pie-making show on the road.

A new automated pizza-making robot prototype that cooks pizzas on the way to customers’ homes is set to be unveiled Tuesday at the Specialty Equipment Market Association’s annual automotive specialty products show in Las Vegas.

The mobile pizza factory, residing in the bed of a zero-emission Toyota Tundra pickup, will get its debut during Toyota’s presentation at the SEMA show. Called “The Kitchen,” the operation includes a refrigerator, a pair of robotic arms and a portable conveyor oven – all of which run on the truck’s hydrogen fuel-cell electric powertrain.

Pizza Hut has yet to test the mobile pizza factory on city streets but sees potential not only for its gee-whiz factor, but for delivering fresher pizzas to a wider delivery area.

“We are always looking to find ways to bring the oven closer to the doors of our consumers,” said Nicolas Burquier, chief operations officer for Pizza Hut. “Our obsession is always the same: How do we reduce the gap between the moment when the pizza comes out of the oven and when the customer starts to enjoy eating our product?”

Pizza Hut and Toyota will show off this zero-emission prototype mobile pizza factory at Toyota’s presentation during the 2018 Specialty Equipment Market Association (SEMA) Show. The Tundra PIE Pro can cook pizzas on the way to customers’ homes.

Futuristic food delivery is all the rage, typically with drones being tested as the delivery vehicle. Two years ago, Domino’s Pizza delivered pizzas using drones in New Zealand, and Alphabet, parent company of Google, teamed with Chipotle to deliver burritos via drones at Virginia Tech. Uber is reportedly looking into developing drones that can deliver food, too, based on a job posting last week that caught the eye of several news outlets.

Among its more traditional innovations, Pizza Hut last year introduced new pizza boxes and new pouches designed to deliver pizzas 15 degrees hotter than in the past. This new robotic prototype would bring even more futuristic twists to pizza delivery.

The automated pizza maker takes six to seven minutes to cook a pizza. After an order is placed, the first robotic arm opens the refrigerator, removes the proper pizza and places it on the oven conveyor, which sends it through a high-speed ventless oven.

When it’s done cooking, the second robotic arm removes the pizza, places it on the cutting board, slices it into six slices and puts it in a pizza box.

A driver would then deliver the pizza to the door. But in the future, the pizza pickup could even drive itself to the customer. Pizza Hut is working with Toyota on its E-Pallete Alliance, part of which is a fully self-driving concept vehicle the car maker revealed earlier this year at the Consumer Electronics Show.

Issues to tackle will include how the robotic pizza maker handles twists and turns on roads, acceleration and braking, and different weather conditions.

Pizza Hut will be doing experiments with the prototype in the coming months, Burquier said. “We’re going to play with this prototype and then figure out what we can learn in order to build the future of our processes and our systems.”