TECUMSEH — It is something that you may not have ever heard of before because there are just five of them in Michigan, but PizzaForno, a pizza vending machine, has come to Tecumseh.

It was just installed on Tuesday and holds 70 pizzas in several different varieties, including a dessert pizza.

Business partners Adam Page, who works in the medical device field, and Tim Ekpo, an orthopedic surgeon, recently opened three 24/7 units in the Jackson area. As of Tuesday, they have a brand-new unit at 606 N. Evans St. in Tecumseh as well as one in Ann Arbor. The vending machine is in the drive-thru of the former bank building and Lenawee Community Foundation office. 

PizzaForno is one of North America’s only automated pizza ovens that bakes artisanal pizzas with quality ingredients in less than three minutes. Accessible 24/7 at the tap of a digital screen, PizzaForno offers a selection of innovative menu options, each made fresh, with an authentic approach.

“We do an automated, robotic delivery of the pizza, and it delivers in a three-minute window. And we have the ability to dispense hot or cold pizza on demand. So it’s a very new and unique way to deliver very good, high-quality food to the public,” Page said. “The hot option is if you want the machine to make your pizza and you want to eat it at the machine or at a table near the machine. The cold option is the machine will pump out a pizza, but it will have directions on the pizza box to cook it at home. It is still fresh and not frozen. We do not freeze anything. Everything is fresh ingredients. It’s just the toppings on the pizza and the cheese isn’t cooked yet; not heated, just topped.”

There are several different varieties to choose from. They are 12-inch round pizzas that can be easily shared by two people, but on average a pizza from PizzaForno serves three, according to Ekpo.

There is a five-cheese blend, pepperoni, meat lovers, Hawaiian, vegetarian, barbecue chicken and bacon, and a desert pizza that is seasonal as well as a pickle pizza and cheeseburger pizza. The current dessert pizza is like a cheesecake.

“The dessert pizza is our version of a cheesecake. You have our crust and then on top of the crust is a crème cheese, there’s Nutella, there’s a raspberry drizzle, there’s chocolate chips. It’s sweet but has some savory ingredients that go on the pizza, and it is fantastic,” Page said. “It truly tastes like a cheesecake. It’s really good.”

The pizzas range from $10 to $13 depending on the type of pizza. The lowest-cost pizza is the five-cheese blend because it has the least amount on it. The more expensive pizzas have more ingredients; for example, the meat lovers is $13 and the dessert pizza goes for $12.

The only PizzaForno vending machines in the country are in Michigan. Ekpo stumbled upon the idea while on vacation.

“My family and I were on vacation in Toronto, and we saw one of their outdoor machines and were immediately intrigued by it, bought all the pizzas, tasted all of them, and they were really great, and decided to come back and discuss with my business partner if we could bring that to Michigan and here we are,” Ekpo said. “Anyone who enjoys pizza will enjoy the pizza itself. It’s a great product and then anyone who likes technology and the novelty, they will enjoy it; the automated side of things. (It is) very simple, very friendly, all touch screen capabilities. It's all digital, so it takes credit cards. It takes basically every credit card for payment.”

And the public has responded well.

“Business has been fantastic," Page said. "When we launched our first unit, we sort of started with a bang in Jackson and there’s a lot of excitement, definitely a lot of buzz around this new concept. And then when people taste the pizza and see that it’s actually very good coming out of a machine, you’re drawn to it. It becomes a concept that people are intrigued by and then it’s good enough that people become repeat customers. And since then, we’ve launched two more units in the Jackson area and they’ve both seen the same acceptance, the same early response with a surge of high traffic and then it levels off at a good rate. So it’s been very successful so far."