These days pizza can arrive by car, delivery bot and even drone. Now you can also get a piping hot pie from a vending machine.

What's happening: PizzaForno, a Toronto-based company, is rolling out its automated pizza vending machines across North America, including in Michigan and other U.S. locations. For $10 to $13, they can serve up a hot, 12-inch pizza in under three minutes.

How it works: The pizza is fresh, not frozen, and made by humans but served by a robot.

Assembled at a regional commissary "with hand-stretched crusts" and "locally sourced ingredients," the uncooked pizzas are loaded into the refrigerated section of PizzaForno’s 65-square-foot automated oven.

The customer chooses a pizza from the menu, then behind the scenes a robotic arm transfers the selected pizza to the oven.

Once baked, it's placed in a box, which emerges from a slot in the storefront like money from an ATM.

Each vending machine holds 70 pizzas, which have a three-day shelf life. Workers restock the machine with fresh pizzas three times a week.

I selected a $12 pepperoni pizza the other night from a PizzaForno machine in Ann Arbor, near the University of Michigan campus.

It worked exactly as described, and the pizza looked and smelled delicious.

The dough was limp, though, and the flavors were lacking. Good in a pinch, maybe.

But why didn't the robot slice the pizza? It turns out there's a slot in the wall to grab a single-serve, biodegradable knife, but I didn't notice it. Not exactly customer-friendly.

You can also get an uncooked pizza to take home for $1 off.

This isn't an entirely new idea. As Erica Pandey noted when she enjoyed server-less dumplings in New York recently, such efforts are reminiscent of the automats of the past, where food appeared in coin-operated kiosks.

The bottom line: Post-pandemic labor shortages could lead to more automated food service in the future.