Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

The mundane underappreciated customer kiosk has been undergoing some radical changes recently. Among the most far-reaching and/or strangest: one that serves live crabs, offers ice cream in exchange for a literally measurable smile, a porn kiosk that asks a lot of specific questions and promises privacy protections, a Pepsi social kiosk that allows you to buy soda for strangers, a convenience store sandwich machine that uses privacy to boost sales, a wine kiosk that detects if you’re already drunk and a machine that measures customers for custom suits.

But this new kiosk out of Europe may just take the record (although that live crab-dispensing kiosk is pretty hard to beat). It makes pizza—from scratch. This thing shows customers its realtime process of kneading dough, forming the round, adding tomato sauce and toppings and then baking it—all in three minutes.

A kiosk that creates and delivers a fresh pizza may not play well in every retailer environment, but it’s worth a shot. Honestly, Nordstrom, would a pizza kiosk in your aisles really kill you?

The pizza kiosk, weighing in at 1,653 pounds and 6.5 feet tall, is from a vendor calling itself Let’s Pizza UK and it offers customers four choices: Margherita, Pepperoni, Ham, or bacon (with or without tomato). It can house enough flour and tomato for 100 pizzas before it needs refilling, the vendor’s site said.

The 10-inch pizza features ingredients that don’t quite conjure up a Sicilian grandmother’s kitchen. What pizza would be complete without a generous helping of sodium pyrophosphate and sodium bicarbonate? (At Domino’s, sodium bicarbonate is generally reserved as the after-dinner chemical.

There is a serious point to all of this: When you’re trying to get creative about store design and layout and thinking through an in-store strategy, look at some of these wacky kiosks and open your mind to creative deployments. In the meantime, move that wine kiosk closer to the pizza kiosk.