From weighing ingredients to portioning dough, automations can save on labor costs and improve quality

Anthony Valinoti spent years making the dough at Hot Springs, Arkansas-based DeLuca’s Pizza by hand – and his elbows were not happy about it. When James Beard Award-winning chef John Currence took an ownership stake in DeLuca’s, investing in a dough mixer was one of his first directives. “At some point, you can’t keep up with making dough by hand,” Currence tells Pizza Today. “You’ll blow out both your sockets. You’ll end up with tendonitis.”

Now that Valinoti has two elbow surgeries and a pair of dough mixers under his belt, he agrees. “We’ve learned to use the mixer to our advantage, because to make dough like that by hand, that many per day, it’s almost impossible,” Valinoti says, adding that DeLuca’s Hot Springs location turns out about 250 pies per day on Fridays and Saturdays during the busy racetrack season.

Beyond quality-of-life improvements, Currence and Valinoti believe dough mixers allow for experimentation and innovation. Seeking to replicate the hand-kneaded pizza dough DeLuca’s is known for, Valinoti says he is careful not to “overmix” the dough. “I would say we mix it for maybe three or four minutes,” he says.

The pair’s second DeLuca’s location in Little Rock, Arkansas, is designed with kitchen flow in mind and even has room for two ovens – doubling the number of appetizers and pizzas kitchen staff can produce.

Of course, dough mixers are just one way pizzaiolos can incorporate kitchen technology to improve efficiency, dial in consistency and elevate quality – all while dodging that pesky foe, tendonitis.

Digital Water Meters

Old-school bakers might be able to eyeball a water container and tell you exactly how much liquid is inside, but those looking to recreate the perfect dough mixture from batch to batch know it is almost impossible to pour the exact same amount of water twice.

Enter the digital water meter, which measures the exact same water weight every time to achieve perfect dough hydration. Some models offer water filters and digital screens that allow users to specify water pressure and temperature as well.

Before purchasing a water meter, Rose City Pizza owner-operator Brian Nittayo says he would weigh water before carrying it over to the mixing bowl – an improvement over his original method: using his eyes to gauge the water level in a liquid measuring cup. Now, he props the hooked end of a hose on the lip of the mixing bowl, sets the attached meter to 24.2 pounds, and the meter does the rest. No heavy lifting required. “You’ve gotta make everything safe for employees. You don’t want them lifting heavy stuff,” Nittayo says, adding that rather than pouring cold water, he cools his flour to achieve the desired dough temperature.

Dough Mixers

Invented for bakers, Planetary Mixers are incredibly versatile and a good option for pizzerias that seek to make their own bread and pastries as well. Dough hooks can easily be replaced with whisks and other mixing attachments, and the bowl is removable, making it easy to clean. The downside: High friction generated by planetary mixers can quickly elevate temperatures inside the mixing bowl. Additionally, this mixer type struggles more than other models to churn high-hydration dough without modifications.

The Spiral Mixer is less prone to heating up and comes in a variety of sizes. Spirals are known for being gentle, making them a good fit for pizzerias looking to create artisan doughs with high hydration. Many mixing bowls are fixed in place, however, meaning you can’t remove them for cleaning, and kitchen staff must reach inside to extract heavy dough, which can be cumbersome.

Those looking for a dough mixer that most closely replicates hand-kneading are likely to prefer the Fork Mixer (also known as the Driving-arm Mixer). This mixer is adept at handling high-hydration dough without heating the product. The drawback of this mixer type is its limited utility for a variety of dough types; it works best to create light, airy pizzas (fork mixers often are used to create pastry dough, for example) rather than heavier styles.

Dough Dividers

In the past few years, Nittayo of Rose City Pizza has invested in several kitchen automations, making it possible to operate his pizzeria in Covina, California, with just two staff members per shift. If he had to recommend one kitchen automation to other pizzeria owners, it would be the dough divider. “A lot of people like to do the rounder first, but I suggest the divider,” he says. “Dividing takes the longest, so the divider was a game changer.”

Nittayo takes dough out of the mixer and sorts it into tubs; he has a key on the wall as a reminder about how many pounds of dough are needed to create 20 dough balls, depending on pizza size. “You just go by that little chart, and then it divides it evenly. It’s a big cookie cutter, it’s like a flower,” he says (see photo on page 24). “I have a cook who lost an arm in an accident, and this helps him out a lot.”

Having the divider saves about 20 minutes per batch, Nittayo says, which leaves more time to autolyze and bench rest his pizza dough.

Dough Rounders

Once dough is divided into appropriately sized sections, a dough rounder can turn those sections into perfect spheres with a uniformly smooth surface almost instantly. Most dough-rounder models automatically adjust to accommodate a variety of dough sizes and take up relatively little space in the kitchen. On some models, dough boxes can be clipped under the machine to catch finished dough balls, eliminating the need for a prep cook to pick up each dough ball and place it in the box for proofing.

Pizzerias should have good SOPs around cleaning dough rounders, as the rounding mechanism often is shielded from view and can get sticky or clogged, especially with high-hydration doughs.

Dough Presses, Rollers and Sheeters

For those looking to improve consistency in their product, dough rollers, sheeters and presses can achieve uniform thickness and shape, but how they do this is different. With a Dough Press, the dough ball is placed in between two plates, which are pushed together, evenly spreading the dough. Heated dough presses can shape pizza crusts with a raised edge. Some pizzamakers prefer dough presses because they evenly distribute the gas created during fermentation, allowing a more uniform flavor. To achieve different sized pizzas, some press models require that plates be changed out.

Dough Rollers and Sheeters are best for pizza styles where uniform thickness is expected, such as cracker-style crust. Unlike the dough press, pizzas created using a dough sheeter won’t have a raised edge unless it is created after the dough goes through the rollers. Sheeters tend to be used for more large-scale operations and can be difficult to clean.

Weighing Cheese And Toppings

Regardless of pizzeria size, many industry veterans believe it is impossible to achieve true consistency without weighing the cheese for each pie. Consistency is not just a detail important to international pizza chains, according to Dan Collier, owner of Southern California-based PizzaMan Dan’s. Speaking at Pizza Expo 2025, Collier says allowing every staff member to decide how much cheese they want to add to a pizza add can throw the business’s profit-and-loss statement into chaos. In addition to implementing SOPs around weighing cheese, Collier says he keeps a close eye on inventory at each pizzeria with the goal of keeping total food costs at 25 percent – a procedure meant to ensure ham-fisted kitchen staff don’t eat away at profit margins. Automated sauce applicators also help owners standardize amounts used for consistency and cost savings.

At Rose City Pizza, Nittayo has digital scales set up at pizza-topping stations, which allow staff to quickly weigh ingredients. “We’re really on top of portioning,” he says. “There’s very little waste.”

Improving Margins and Quality

For Currence, embracing technology is what helps make restaurants such as DeLuca’s Pizza more efficient and consistent. Labor challenges are “not getting any easier,” he says, but technology will make it possible to innovate and improve on current offerings.

Meanwhile, Rose City Pizza’s automations represent a large upfront investment, but Nittayo says the increased efficiencies and savings in labor costs have allowed him not just to cut back on labor (he went from 16 to nine employees) but also to lower prices for consumers. His $28 signature large pizza, for example, now costs $22. “I attribute that mostly to the automation. Labor is the biggest cost, but you can control it with automation,” he says. “The customers don’t even notice that we’re short a person, and we have just two people on at night.”