The Fast Casual Nation Podcast offers exclusive interviews with experts ranging from top chefs and brand makers to executives and restaurants who work in one of the fastest-growing segments of the restaurant industry. In this episode, I talk with Massimo Noja De Marco, chief executive officer and co-founder of Piestro about his extensive background as an entrepreneur in the restaurant industry and an emerging leader in kitchen automation.

Noja De Marco was born and raised in the hospitality industry, he is part of a seven-generation family in hotels and restaurants. He tells me that his mom was a fabulous chef and his grandparents and great grandparents ran hotels in Italy on the north side of Milan on the Swiss border. He says, “So I was born, I was literally born in the hotel just like my father and my grandfather were so you know I just fell in love with the hospitality from a very very young age. You know, when I was a little kid I asked my grandfather to promise me that when I would turn five years old he would teach me how to make cappuccino in the hotel and you know by the time five years old came around I already knew how to do it.”

When Noja De Marco moved to New York in his twenties, he opened restaurants, a few Italian and one French restaurant. He talks about hospitality and says, “I really embrace that the hospitality, the ability to change people's perspective on life on any given day by just being excited by serving them something delicious and just making them feel like they were your best friends that you hadn't seen for a lifetime.” Noja De Marco moved to California and opened restaurants there too. He worked for the Ritz-Carlton as well as Wolfgang Puck Catering and did events including the Oscars.

Noja De Marco launched Kitchen United and drove all aspects of design with a focus on setting up a better way for off-premise business for restaurants. Kitchen United which was the first ghost kitchen space in the United States was about optimizing the space for the restaurants. He says, “I really wanted to optimize the entire space and since I had already started working with robotics probably about a year and a half earlier with Miso Robotics which you know the parent company of Flippy, I got super excited. I'm like what if I can bring that into the ghost kitchen space but what if I can bring that automation into the restaurants.”

We chatted about Piestro, which Noja De Marco calls his favorite thing and he has been dreaming about it for years. Piestro has designed robots that make pizza at a fraction of the cost. It eliminates the retail footprint and labor costs, making pizzas using high-quality ingredients for less.

To hear more of Noja De Marco’s insights for restaurant brands and Piestro’s partnership with 800 Degrees Pizza, listen to this episode of Fast Casual Nation on Apple Podcasts.