Picture this: you’re in the middle of a long day of travel, waiting on a layover in the Atlanta Airport when hunger strikes. You begin walking through the terminal in search of a bite to eat, when something unexpected stops you in your tracks. It’s a pizza vending machine.
Yes, you heard that right. A pizza vending machine—and it’s already a reality at four airports across the country.
California Pizza Kitchen recently announced a partnership with T-ROC Global. The mission? Deploy up to 1,000 pizza vending machines across the nation. The brand has already rolled out several, including at Boston, Dallas, Atlanta, and Dayton airports, with plans to add 15 more at universities throughout the country this year.
On busy days, the vending machine at Hartsfield-Jackson in Atlanta reportedly serves up to 140 pizzas—each one cooked in just 90 seconds.
The goal is to target locations where quick, accessible hot meals are in demand: airports, universities, hospitals, hotels, office complexes, residential communities, EV charging stations, and sports venues, to name a few.
Kiosks make 7-inch pizzas—averaging $12 per pie—offering many of the same options available at CPK’s sit-down restaurants, such as the famous BBQ chicken pizza that helped catapult the brand to fame.
CPK went through hefty research before finalizing the machines, settling on TurboChef ovens and frozen ingredients—which expands shelf life and improves cooking time—to deliver guests a surprisingly good pizza. “When the consumer opens it, it’s crispy as if it was cooked in a wood fire oven,” said Michael Beacham, president of California Pizza Kitchen Global, in an interview with Fast Company.
T-ROC Global will operate the kiosks under a license agreement, using its 32 warehouses, a dedicated van fleet, and thousands of technicians to keep machines running and stocked.
The move comes just six years after CPK filed for bankruptcy, and only eight months after it was sold to Consortium Brand Partners. Pizza vending machines are just a part of the comeback.
Whether New Jersey will receive any CPK kiosks remains to be seen—and whether the pies will hold up to our impossibly high pizza standards here in the Garden State is even more of a question.
But what we know for certain is this: Long gone are the days of chips and chocolate bars being the only vending machine options. Now, we’ve got hot, fresh pizza, too. And it only takes 90 seconds.
Peter Candia is the Food + Drink Editor at New Jersey Digest. A graduate of The Culinary Institute of America, Peter found a passion for writing midway through school and never looked back. He is a former line cook, server and bartender at top-rated restaurants in the tri-state area. In addition to food, Peter enjoys politics, music, sports and anything New Jersey.
