Last Updated on August 31, 2025 by Craig Allen Keefner
Continuing on the contactless automat and vending machine trend, Piestro is now partnering with facial recognition payment company PopID.
Artisanal Pizza Robots
From NRN April 2021 —
Editors note: We fully expect to see robotic food trucks in the NRF drive-thru lot outside Javits next year. Take the food to buyers is a core strategy it seems these days. And delivery and pickup have that automatic cooling off period before you get home. For events and gatherings these will be very useful.
Excerpt:
After Kitchen United co-founder Massimo Noja De Marco left the ghost kitchen company in 2020, he built another startup, Piestro — a portable pizzeria powered by robots and reminiscent of a futuristic automat or vending machine — that launched in June 2020. Now, nearly a year after launch, Piestro is kicking off its second crowdfunding campaign on StartEngine and announced on Tuesday their partnership with facial recognition payment company, PopID.
“It’s a very sophisticated piece of technology, this standalone machine that assembles and cooks delicious artisanal pizzas in three minutes or less right in front of you,” De Marco said. “From the window, you can actually watch all of the fresh ingredients that you picked falling down onto your pizza.”
PopID Facial Payment
The latest technology add-on to Piestro is PopID, a partnership that was just announced Tuesday. PopID uses facial recognition technology that can let customers order and pay for their pizzas simply by showing their face.
Kiwibot Delivery Robots
The company is also partnering with robot delivery service KiwiBot to round out the human-free pizza experience for customers that order Piestro for delivery.
Read the full article at NRN April 2021
