For many people, the smell of a pizza fresh from the oven and lovingly crafted is a culinary delight that's hard to beat. But now that hand-crafted pizza has a rival: pizza made by robot. French start-up Ekim wants to change and speed up the way pizza is made and served, using a pizzaiolo robot. 

Usually seen in factories, this robot is capable of spreading tomato sauce on the pizza base, putting the pizza in the oven, taking out a cardboard box and cutting the pizza.

The robot's gestures have been synchronized to a real-life pizzaiolo, from the art of spreading the dough to the technique of putting oil and pepper on top of a steaming pizza.

Able to perform several tasks at once with its three arms, inventors say the pizza-making robot can deliver a pizza every thirty seconds and up to 120 an hour, when a human merely reaches at best 40 pizzas an hour.

But it's not all about being fast. All the ingredients offered to the customers are organic and carefully selected in France and Italy.

PHILIPPE GOLDMAN CEO, EKIM "Robots allow customers to personalize their pizzas at any time of the day, even up to 2 am. This is something quite amazing and new which can't be done in fast food or traditional restaurants. This is what robots bring, it allows for a totally new experience. It also reassures clients in a rush. People nowadays have less and less available time to eat, they hardly have 30 minutes to have lunch. Therefore, they have to choose between time and food quality. What we're doing is providing both."

The robot pizza hasn't left its showroom just outside Paris but Ekim are currently looking for a place in the French capital to install their autonomous restaurant and plan to franchise their concept as soon as 2019 for it to cross the French border into Europe and the rest of the world.

But at the O'Scia pizzeria in central Paris, the chef is made of flesh. Neapolitan born and bred, Vittorio Monti has golden hands and the pizzas that come out of his oven are as close as it gets to pizza heaven. His art, he says, cannot be reproduced by a robot.

VITTORIO MONTI CHEF, O'SCIA RESTAURANT "No, no, the future can't be a robot for pizza, pizza is a tradition, the tradition for a pizza is that it's made by hand."

Although he admits a human being will always cost more than a robot, there's no way a robot can adapt to the living ingredients he uses every day.