How to actually get pizza reheating right in an automated kitchen
If you’ve ever tried to reheat a pizza in a commercial setting, you know the struggle. You either end up with cold cheese and a burnt crust, or a soggy mess that feels like it’s been steamed. To fix this, we stopped thinking about “heating the air” and started using short-wave infrared lamps. Instead of warming up the whole oven, these lamps shoot energy straight into the food. It’s fast. Really fast. And that’s the only way to get the cheese bubbling without turning the crust into a cracker. Getting the temperature just right You can’t just flip a switch on and off and hope for the best. That leads to wild temperature swings. Instead, we use PID controllers and Solid State Relays (SSRs). Think of it like a dimmer switch on steroids. The system pulses the power to keep the heat locked in a tiny window—usually within about 1°C. Because the heat ramps up in seconds, you don’t need a massive, sprawling oven taking up half your kitchen floor. The gear we use We stick with quartz glass envelopes for the lamps. Why? Because they can take a beating when the temperature jumps from zero to a hundred instantly. The wattage is where we get specific. If your conveyor belt is flying, you need more power to hit that surface temperature the moment the pizza slides under the lamp. And since nobody likes a nightmare during a midnight shift, we use standardized connectors. If a lamp burns out, your maintenance person can just pop a new one in. No rewiring the whole cabinet, no swearing at a manual—just plug and play. The parts that can go wrong Here’s the thing: infrared heat is aggressive. It works great, but it puts a lot of stress on your electrical system. You have to make sure your wiring and contactors can handle that initial surge of power. If you skimp here, things will pop. Then there’s the “heat soak” problem. If your cooling fans are in the wrong spot, that heat will eventually drift over and fry your control boards. We usually put thermal shields around the PLC and sensors. It keeps the electronics cool and prevents the signals from drifting, which keeps the whole line running smooth.