Pizza Vending Machine

One of the few things I’ve been craving regularly since being on the South Beach Diet is pizza. Not just any pizza, of course: genuine New York-style, foldable, greasy pepperoni pizza is my personal favorite. Still, in an emergency, something is better than nothing. If only a local business cared enough about my cravings to install a Wonder Pizza machine. This vending machine holds up to 102 individual (9 inch) pizzas, in three varieties, any of which can be ordered, heated in a built-in high-temperature oven (not a microwave!), and served in less than two minutes. (Suggested retail price per pizza: $5.)

Now, if pizza from a vending machine sounds about as lame as you can get, consider this odd fact: the machines are manufactured in Torino, Italy—a place where, one would hope, pizza-making expertise is plentiful. Whether or not that’s reflected in the taste of the final product, I can only speculate.

I don’t know how much it costs to buy one of these machines, nor whether they’ve actually been deployed anywhere in the United States. But I can imagine these machines doing brisk business in college dorms and in the break rooms of high-tech companies where programmers code around the clock and subsist on junk food and Mountain Dew.