The Midwest’s first pizza vending machine has arrived in Marshall, and Missouri Valley College students can take advantage of the three-minute pies.

The machine, which will also produce brownies and cookies, will be unveiled to the public at 10:30 a.m. Friday, July 21.

Liz Huff, owner of Catalpa Restaurant in Arrow Rock, is busy making hundreds of pizzas to keep the machine stocked. She and Missouri Valley College’s new president, Joe Parisi, cooked up the idea in the spring when Huff was a speaker for the Maastricht Institute on the MVC campus.

Just a couple of months after that initial discussion, a kiosk-type machine that is about the size of an ATM has arrived all the way from France.

“Our students are going to eat this up,” Parisi said. “Liz Huff is such a true entrepreneur and she is modeling that for us in our school of business. I think we’re going to see these machines popping up all over the Midwest very soon.”

Huff said the machine stores up to 96 pizzas in a refrigerated zone. When an order comes in via a Smart Pizza mobile app or directly keyed in at the front of the machine, a 12-inch pizza moves into one of the two stone-bottom ovens that fires up to close to 700 degrees.

The machine sits outside of Burns gymnasium on the MVC campus.