Of Crusts and Drones

Technology, Climate, and the Ubiquitous Slice

[The following in an excerpt from Pizza Futures, a forecast of pizza’s future by Nobell Foods. You can download your copy here.]

In the opening minutes of the prescient 1995 thriller The Net, the movie’s protagonist, played by Sandra Bullock, demonstrates the nascent internet’s potential by doing something that was not yet possible at the time: She orders a pizza online.

The scene evokes one of pizza’s defining characteristics: It is the quintessentially modern food, having evolved from its traditional origins into a ubiquitous and infinitely adaptable product. When a new technology emerges — like the internet itself, or robots, or Bitcoin — pizza delivery tends to be an early application. 

The contemporary diet is as much a product of supply chains as culinary tradition and craft, and few foods have benefited more than pizza has from innovations in last-mile logistics and production techniques.

Long before the present era of food delivery apps and 15-minute grocery services, pizza had become synonymous with on-demand delivery. In 1979, Domino’s codified that reputation by guaranteeing deliveries in 30 minutes or less — a marketing ploy that became a widely-understood benchmark for the speed of local food transportation. As the 20th century progressed, pizza was increasingly the default menu choice for gatherings ranging from parties to professional events, because it was usually just a phone call away.

Pizza, in other words, travels well. It is food that can go anywhere. As a result, 13 percent of Americans eat pizza on any given day. The simplicity and flexibility of pizza’s ingredients and preparation have contributed to this, as have developments like frozen pizza and insulated delivery bags. And if pizza is the enduring avatar of last-mile food logistics, then the square cardboard pizza box is the equivalent of the shipping container, standardizing and streamlining its form as it traverses the urban supply chain just as the 30-minute guarantee standardized temporal expectations. 

Even Apple found the pizza box to be an irresistible design problem, patenting its own round version for use in its headquarters. Moving pizzas within office buildings is a different challenge than transporting them along city streets, though. “Like all Apple products, the proprietary standard of the box makes it incompatible with third-party products,” William Turton writes for The Outline. In other words, Apple’s box did not threaten the supremacy of the square cardboard version (although it probably did not intend to).

Pizza has evolved over time to fit its distribution systems: It is flat, round, and stackable, with measurable and predictable dimensions — perfect for bulk transportation. Pizza is also modular, denominated in consistent units: pies and equally-sized slices, ideal for reliably feeding any specific number of people (another reason it became the ideal party food). A pizza is such a comprehensible quantity of food that Amazon famously used it as a benchmark for the size of its internal teams.

If pizza is to remain the food of the future, it must continue to adapt to changing conditions — particularly climate change. In Neal Stephenson’s 1992 sci-fi novel Snow Crash, set in the following century, he writes that there are only four things the United States does better than anyone else: music, movies, software, and high-speed pizza delivery. In contrast to Stephenson’s dematerialized information landscape, pizza remains strikingly physical, still an object of society’s logistical prowess.

The future that we actually face today, of course, is all too physical, with the 20th century’s techno-optimism now tempered by the need to decrease fossil fuel consumption. Just as pizza delivery helped illustrate how we would use the emergent internet thirty years ago, it can demonstrate a different kind of innovation in food logistics today, helping us to reduce our collective resource footprint and inhabit the earth less intrusively.

As a representative product of food supply chains — both local and global — pizza is perfectly positioned to help accomplish those goals, and is already anticipating the broader shift toward transportation modes that are more energy-efficient and less carbon-intensive.

The supply chain’s inefficient “last mile,” where short-haul urban food delivery occurs, offers significant opportunities for such improvement, including a departure from one of pizza delivery’s most familiar tropes: the delivery person shuttling pies around town in a gasoline-powered, greenhouse-gas-emitting automobile. From an energy consumption perspective, using a full-sized car to transport a single pizza is undeniably overkill.

Beyond the straightforward shift toward delivery via bicycles, scooters, and electric cars, a growing share of pizza delivery will be conducted by robots and other self-driving vehicles. The industry’s perennial pioneer, Domino’s, is already testing driverless curbside delivery in Houston with compact, electric cars from robotics company Nuro. Domino’s delivers 1.5 million pizzas each day and its U.S. drivers travel 10 million miles per week, so expansion of that pilot program could have a non-negligible impact on car usage. The prospect of 3D-printing pizzas at home, meanwhile, could reduce the distance that pies need to travel at all. For all the foresight Stephenson displayed in Snow Crash, it’s possible he overestimated humans’ long-term role in slinging pizza.

At the global scale, climate change imposes constraints that will require dietary adaptation. Pizza’s flexibility is a perfect match for this challenge: No single ingredient is essential and creative substitutions often enhance the finished product. Given red meat’s notorious carbon footprint, foods that work well without it will be staples of a climate-resilient future.

 Cauliflower pizza crusts increasingly accommodate gluten-free diets, while vegan pizza has also flourished alongside plant-based meat options. Pizza thus benefits from futurism in the broader food industry, as it always has.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is already possible to order a pizza in the metaverse. Just as unsurprisingly, the incentive to do so is real pizza, not a virtual representation of it. For the foreseeable future, we will continue to need food in the physical world, and that will be where we keep seeking our pizza, however digitally-mediated the process becomes (as The Net anticipated in 1995). Pizza’s history demonstrates how it pairs well with a wide array of technologies that improve its production and distribution. For much of that history, improvement has simply meant more pizza, delivered more efficiently, but climate change dictates new goals that will require new approaches.

Pizza remains eminently adaptable, though, and is perfectly suited to continue evolving accordingly. One hundred years from now, we should still expect to find pizza everywhere, whatever novel forms it may assume.

Drew Austin is a writer and urban planner based in New York City.