Students work at Agápe Automation, advance Donatos Pizza’s technology

Logan Nowlin
Thu, 30 Nov 2023 00:54:39 +0000
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Donatos Pizza and Agápe Automation Founder Jim Grote chats with software engineering consultant and third-year electrical engineering student Hayden Frea. Grote and Frea share a patent for the Sm^rt Saucer, an automated pizza saucing device.
Credit: Courtesy of The Ohio State University

Agápe Automation is bringing slices of mechanization to several Donatos Pizza kitchens.

Created by Donatos Pizza founder Jim Grote, Agápe Automation, a branch of Grote’s EDGE Innovation Hub that aims to further automate the food technology industry, has been in operation since July 2022, chief operating officer Craig Turner said. The various Ohio State students and alumni who work at Agápe Automation help engineer the food technology industry at large, he said.

“Jim’s an inventor. He thinks about how to automate systems to make people’s jobs, lives and days a little better,” Turner, also an Ohio State alum, said. “We always ask ourselves, ‘How can we help these restaurant teams deal with all of the hard challenges they go through on a daily basis, especially during those Friday nights or big game Saturdays?’”

Since its inception, Agápe Automation has implemented three new devices — the Sm^rt Saucer, the Sm^rt Pepp and the Sm^rt Ring — in select Donatos Pizza locations, Turner said. These innovations’ names carry symbolic meaning for the company, he said.

“We replace the ‘a’ in ‘Smart’ with an exponent to signify the exponential growth that can be achieved with automation technology,” Turner said.

The Sm^rt Saucer, the company’s first major innovation, is a pizza-saucing device intended to automate the sauce-application process and reduce employee fatigue, Turner said.

Hayden Frea, a third-year in electrical engineering, was one of the lead engineers on the Sm^rt Saucer project and is listed alongside Grote on the machine’s official patent, Turner said.

Frea said his involvement with Donatos began when he was a 17-year-old high school senior; after being introduced to Grote and Turner via a friend who worked at the EDGE Innovation Hub, he likewise landed a job there and began creating the saucer. His success helped to inspire Agápe Automation’s establishment in 2022, Frea said.

To operate the Sm^rt Saucer, employees must place pizza dough on a turntable, select the desired diameter and supervise the machine as it applies sauce to the pie in roughly seven seconds, Frea said.

“This job allows me to be creative and work on a lot of different things at one time,” Frea said. “You’re not just sitting behind a computer trying to optimize one particular thing.”

In addition to Frea, several current and former Ohio State students work on Agápe Automation’s staff, Turner said.

“We love hiring Buckeyes,” Turner said. “We have hired, oh my gosh, so many Buckeye interns, and I hope we get to do more and more of that in the future.”

Following the Sm^rt Saucer, Agápe Automation created the Sm^rt Pepp, a device intended to automate the pepperoni pizza-topping process. Turner said four in-store Sm^rt Pepp prototype pilots are presently being tested.

“It is doing great, and we’re very much looking forward to commercializing the Sm^rt Pepp,” Turner said.

Agápe Automation has also created the Sm^rt Ring, a plastic, ring-shaped device that helps funnel cheese directly onto pizzas, Turner said.

Going forward, Turner said Agápe Automation will turn its efforts toward designing new prototypes, vision technologies, artificial intelligence integration(s) and softwares. While Agápe Automation’s inventions are only currently utilized in Donatos Pizza locations, Turner said the company’s eventual hope is expanding into the wider market.

“Our goal is to make the kitchen a better place, and we do that by automating with love,” Turner said.