1957

Frozen Pizza

Imagine that you want to make a fresh pizza in your home. For this, you do not need an engineer. You mix up some dough, spread it out flat, put some sauce on it, and sprinkle cheese over the sauce. You do this with your hands using ingredients from your pantry and refrigerator. Now imagine that you want to mass produce 100,000 pizzas every day because you have created a popular frozen pizza brand sold in grocery stores. For example, Celentano is often mentioned as the first brand to sell frozen pizzas in America in 1957. For this, engineers are a must. Making 100,000 pizzas in a day at a reasonable price without any glitches is a big challenge.

The kind of engineer you need in this situation is called a manufacturing engineer. To make so many pizzas cost efficiently, nearly every step in the process will be done by machine, and in huge quantities. If each pizza consists of a pound of dough, you need machines to make fifty tons of dough per day. If there are just two ounces of pepperoni on each pizza, you need to dispense 12,500 pounds of pepperoni per day. That means huge bins to hold it, conveyor belts to move it around, and a special machine to apply the pepperoni evenly on each pizza.

What if a food scientist determines that the pizza must be frozen in less than three minutes to -20°F, or else the crust will get mealy? An engineer must design a machine that can do that 100,000 times a day. It might be a giant wind tunnel in which the windchill temperature is -60°F, or a machine that dips the pizzas in liquid nitrogen to freeze them instantly.

Then, at the end of every day, the whole assembly line needs to be broken down and cleaned. This might generate 10,000 gallons of water filled with tomato sauce, dough bits, and lots of disinfectant. The city won’t let you discharge this into the sewer system. So an engineer will need to design a wastewater treatment plant for the factory.

It is impossible to build a modern, automated factory without engineers, whether that factory makes cars, golf balls, or pizzas.

SEE ALSO Mass Production (1845), Modern Sewer System (1859).

An advertisement for frozen pizza.