Pembroke's pizza vending machine the fastest pizza in the west

PEMBROKE, ONT. -

Travelling west of Ottawa through the valley, you will not get a faster pizza than the one you can find at the Pembroke Esso gas station.

It may seem like an odd place to get a pizza, but it is thanks to the location’s PizzaForno pizza vending machine.

Gas station owner Gao Tang says he purchased the vending machine in November in the middle of the pandemic.

"Less contact with the people, less spread of COVID. So I think that was probably a good idea," Tang says of the new addition to his location, and once it arrived, word in town spread fast.

"Everyone wanted to try it in the beginning. No one had an automatic pizza machine before."

The pizzas are made on location inside the gas station’s kitchen and are then put inside the vending machine. The machine keeps them fresh for three days, after which the machine will no longer dispense them.

A look at the PizzaForno pizza available in the vending machine at the Esso gas station in Pembroke. (Dylan Dyson/CTV News Ottawa)

Station manager Trudy Romain says when it first arrived, her job moved entirely to making pizzas.

"When it first came we were making 60 to 70 pizzas non-stop for quite a while," Romain says. Tang had to hire a chef specifically just to make pizzas at the gas station.

"We would make them and then load them, and then we just couldn’t keep up at the beginning. As fast as we were loading them, we’d come in the next day and it’d be empty."

Demand has since slowed to 20 to 30 pizzas sold per day, but Romain says the fast food option remains popular with the vending machine on Greenwood Road, which leads in and out of Pembroke.

It is also the only 24/7 fast food option east of the city, pushing out a hot pizza in just three minutes.

"I think it’s pretty handy, I think it works here because there’s nothing in this end of town," says Pembroke resident Brett Wells, who stopped to get a cheese pizza for the first time Friday. "We’re always here getting fuel and we see it, so I figured we’d try it."

The vending machine offers a variety of flavours from standard pepperoni and cheese, to barbecue chicken, and vegetarian.

Passing through on their way to Guelph, Ont., tree planters Alex Pogue and Trinity Sawyer grabbed a four-cheese pizza for the drive. Pogue says it passes the taste test.

"I would say for coming out of a machine, I would give it a good seven out of ten. It’s a little floppy but other than that it’s pretty good."