Pizza is a staple of every college experience. Whether you’re ordering it for dinner because you’re tired of the dining hall’s food or enjoying a couple slices at 3 a.m. after a fun night out - pizza and college kids go together like peanut butter and jelly. That being said, there’s nothing worse than calling a pizza place and having them be closed or biting into a slice of soggy pizza from the cafeteria. So, a vending machine where the perfect pizza is produced every time is essentially a dream for any college kid who knows this struggle. I can honestly say that I’ve had a similar conversation with my college roommates. Well, that dream is now a reality at Ohio’s Xavier University thanks to the Pizza ATM.
That’s right; pizza is now coming out of a machine that operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week. All pizza, all the time. I can hear your sighs of envy from here.
Xavier already had popular pizza available in their dining hall, but has upped their game by offering those same delicious pizzas via Pizza ATM. That means pizza is available for everyone, anytime, whether they go to the dining hall or not.
So, how does this glorious invention work? The 12-inch pies will be served for $9, which is a decent price considering that it gets rid of delivery
wait time and you can personalize it to your liking. All customers have to do is choose their toppings on the touch screen, hit a button and, within three minutes, they will have a fresh-baked pizza in a box. Now, you may be wondering whether these are just frozen pizzas that are microwaved within the machine. If that’s the case, why not just go to the grocery store, buy a frozen pizza and make it yourself? One of the things that makes the ATM so great is that it is not, in fact, frozen, warmed up pizza being dispensed. Every pie comes out freshly baked thanks to an internal convection oven and can be personalized to the customers’ wants.
What’s shocking is that the Pizza ATM has been available for 14 years, but Xavier University is the first location in the U.S. to use one. They have been installed in other places around the world, given that it was created by a French company. The Pizza ATM has been receiving rave reviews from students and professors alike on Twitter and Facebook (News - Alert). It is stocked with 70 pizzas at a time, but something tells me that there are going to have to be many refills in order. These lucky students are giving it a thumbs-up, which hopefully means that more Pizza ATMs will be available across the U.S. soon. As for me, I’m going to try not to think about what could have been if this machine had made its debut at my University only a few short years ago.