Seeing How Costco Makes Pizza Is Truly Satisfying
The Costco food court can be a magical place for hungry shoppers looking to down a huge slice of cheesy pepperoni pizza and not spend much money while doing so. For those who have witnessed the pizza-making process take place from the display window, you've likely feasted your eyes on the ultra-satisfying swirl of sauce that goes on behind the scenes. Employees working the kitchen are trained to craft 18-inch pizzas quickly and efficiently before throwing them into the oven. To make sure there's always a fresh supply of pizza to go around, the bulk retailer has a few handy tricks up its sleeve that help save the company time while maximizing sales. One of the best parts about Costco's fast food court is the automated sauce wheel that always seems to drop a jaw or two when curious onlookers pass by.
Costco's pizza robot looks more like a record player, using a nozzle to dispense sauce onto the dough as it spins on a rotating platform. Its purpose is to ensure there is an equal distribution of pizza sauce all the way to the crust's edge, which also eliminates the risk of human error and wasting of sauce. Each delicious Costco pizza receives the exact same portion of sauce, which takes the robot about 10 seconds to do. This means employees are able to attend to other quick tasks in the meantime. This pizza saucer doesn't come cheap, either, but it's proven to be a valuable asset for the chain in the long run.
Costco's pizza sauce machine can save hours of work per week
Snagging one of these innovative sauce dispensers will put quite a dent in one's wallet, but to Costco's food court pizza-makers, it's worth every penny purely for how much time it saves during the assembly process. This programmable device is called the Autosaucer, and it can save companies a whole 7-10 hours of work each week, or a yearly total of 400 hours. Before the employment of this handy robot, employees were just using regular ladles. Even if saucing the dough by hand was slightly faster, it wasn't perfect every time like it is with the Autosaucer.
@darrellwhitelightning
As you can tell from this TikTok video, posted by @darrellwhitelightning, it's no wonder crowds tend to get lost in the sauce as they stop to ogle the mesmerizing swirls. After the perforated dough is sauced to perfection, Darrell weighs a bowl of cheese for accuracy before he starts to places the required 60 pepperoni slices on each pie. Maybe Costco's next innovation should be finding a pepperoni-counting robot to save even more time during the topping stage. Most users also saw the mechanical beauty that is the Autosaucer, with comments like, "Costco really in 3020 with that sauce machine," and tons of mind-blown references to record players. If you've ever wondered how Costco pizza is really made, you're welcome.