Dining at Costco’s food court, with its iconic $1.50 hot dog combo and $1.99 giant pizza slice, can sometimes be a bigger draw than actually shopping at the warehouse club. With the staggering quantities of its most popular eats that are sold every day, Costco employs some interesting ways to keep up with demand while ensuring consistent quality. The magic happens at the back of the food court, where Costco’s shockingly fast pizza-making process employs a bevy of tricks and technological wizardry to ensure efficiency, speed, and consistency. While every step is minutely planned, the way each pizza gets sauced best showcases just how slick the whole setup is. TikTok user @eric.schneiter posted a video of Costco’s pizza-saucing robot, which automatically sauces a large 12-inch pie in a matter of seconds without missing a spot, ensuring each bite gets just the right amount of sauce.
@eric.schneiter Check out the new Pizza sauce robot at Costco! 😱 This is super cool haha! #howitsmade #robot #asmr #asmrtiktoks #new #newtrend #oddlysatisfying #pizza #pizzalover #interesting
♬ dance(256762) – TimTaj
The Costco employees simply place the tray holding the stretched dough on the contraption and switch it on; the rest happens automatically. It’s interesting to see how the robot layers the sauce in a spiral, since most human pizza makers also use a spiral motion to spread sauce on a pizza; the traditional done-by-hand way generally starts from the center and spreads the sauce outwards towards the edge in a spiral. Costco’s automated saucing machine starts from the outside and works its way to the center of the dough.
Costco uses multiple techniques to make pizzas
Considering Costco still uses an archaic paper-and-pen cake-ordering system, it’s interesting to see how far in the other direction it goes with making its food court pizzas. The process isn’t fully automated, and uses a mix of employees and tasty tech to whip up a hot and fresh pizza in about 10 minutes from start to finish. The first gadget is the dough crusher, which flattens a pre-sized dough ball at 130 degrees Fahrenheit for exactly seven seconds to make the perfectly even raw base. This is then hand-stretched to fit the round baking tray and moved to the saucing robot, which some likened to a record player because the nozzle resembles the needle moving over the record-like pizza base rotating below it.
The next step, while done by hand, is still carefully calibrated as Costco employees weigh out a staggering amount of cheese to spread over the sauced pizza base. If it’s a pepperoni pizza, the little round disks of meat are arranged over the cheese. Each pie gets a fixed 60 pieces of pepperoni and Costco uses a 4-3-2-1 pattern for ensuring that every pizza is evenly covered and every bite has equal proportions of meat, cheese, sauce, and crust. Six minutes in the oven is all it takes for the pizza to be baked to perfection, then it only has an hour to get sold before it’s tossed. Despite pizza being such a small part of the company’s operations, Costco still goes through enough cheesy goodness to be ranked as one of the largest pizza chains in the country.
