Clayton Wood is stepping down as CEO of the Seattle-based food robotics company Picnic Works.
Wood announced the move Tuesday on LinkedIn. He is stepping out of the CEO role after Picnic earlier this month confirmed it had laid off employees but didn't disclose how many.
"It’s been an exhilarating adventure, helping to build a new industry of restaurant automation, and I’m very proud of the work I was able to accomplish," Wood wrote on LinkedIn. "Now it’s time for something new (after a breather). What does that look like? I don’t know exactly."
Wood joined Picnic as CEO in 2018, according to his LinkedIn page, before which he spent three years at Seattle-based agriculture technology company IUNU. His LinkedIn notes he was chief operating officer at IUNU, which helps growers identify problems early by using cameras and computer vision technology. He spent about eight years at the industrial giant Honeywell earlier in his career.
"The entire Picnic team is grateful for the five years of service that Clayton gave the company," a Picnic spokesperson said in a statement to the Business Journal. "After five years, he and the board felt it was time for new leadership to guide the business through its next phase of growth. ... We’ll share additional information regarding the search for a new CEO and other company updates as these become available."
Picnic, founded in 2016, makes a robot that assembles, but does not cook, pizzas. Proportions and ingredients are still up to the operator, but the machine applies the cheese, sauce and toppings. According to the company, a single operator can assemble 130 oven-ready pizzas per hour with the machine, which is about 7 feet wide, 5 feet tall and 3 feet deep.
Picnic has deals with colleges like the University of Mississippi and Ohio State University, as well as a deal it made in August with Speedy Eats, a Baton Rouge, Louisiana-based automated restaurant group. Wood said at the time the deal could be worth as much as $800 million if Speedy Eats hits its goal of opening 5,000 U.S. locations in the next five years. Picnic raised $16.3 million in 2021 and disclosed raising $13.8 million in a November 2022 regulatory filing.
Multiple local companies have changed leadership in February. Seattle-based sales and marketing technology company Marchex earlier this month named private equity executive Edwin Miller as CEO to replace Russell Horowitz and Michael Arends, who had served as co-CEOs before Miller took over. Tanium, meanwhile, this month announced co-founder Orion Hindawi was stepping down as CEO and being replaced by Dan Streetman, previously the CEO of the data management company Tibco Software.
