Pick and Cheese Review: The Conveyor Belt Is a Pricing System

The colour of the plate is the price, it was invented for sushi in 1958, and it solved a problem that had nothing to do with food

Pick and Cheese in Camden holds a 4.4 from fifteen hundred and sixty-two people, charges ten to twenty pounds, and the cheese comes past you on a conveyor belt.

And the conveyor belt is a pricing system.

Where it comes from

Yoshiaki Shiraishi, in Osaka, in 1958.

He ran a sushi restaurant and he could not afford the staff.

And he had visited a brewery, and watched bottles moving along a conveyor – and he worked out that if the food moved instead of the waiter, one person could serve a room.

It took him five years to get the belt to work. The speed had to be exactly right: fast enough to keep the food circulating, slow enough for a customer to pick up a plate without lunging.

The answer was about eight centimetres a second. He tested it for years.

The plate is the price

Which is the genuinely clever part and which is invisible to almost everybody using it.

The colour or pattern of the plate encodes what the item costs.

Which means: no menu, no ordering, no bill to calculate, no waiter to summon, no language barrier, and no possibility of misunderstanding.

You count the plates at the end. That is the bill.

The Prat’s commercial desk regards this as one of the most elegant pieces of systems design in the entire hospitality industry – because it solved the labour problem, the ordering problem, the billing problem and the translation problem with a single decision about crockery.

And it changed the behaviour

Which is the part the operators understood immediately.

You do not order from a conveyor. You react to it.

Which means the decision is made in about one second, under mild time pressure, based entirely on what the thing looks like – and a customer who is reacting rather than deciding will take more plates than a customer who is reading a menu.

Everybody in the industry knows this. Nobody says it out loud.

The cheese

British, all of it, and the list is genuinely serious – which is the actual argument of the place and which is worth taking seriously.

Britain makes extraordinary cheese and spent about forty years pretending it did not, because the war rationalised production down to a handful of industrial cheddars and it took two generations to recover.

Almost every great British cheese you can buy today was either revived or invented after 1970.

Verdict

Excellent, cheap, and you will take more plates than you meant to.

Why Britain lost its cheese

The war, and then the Milk Marketing Board.

During rationing, cheese production was standardised – farmhouse cheesemaking was effectively banned, milk was directed to a small number of industrial plants, and the output was a single hard cheese called Government Cheddar.

Which was sensible, in a war.

And it ran, in various forms, for years afterwards – and by the time the restrictions lifted, the farms had stopped, the skills had gone, and an entire generation of cheesemakers had left the trade and not come back.

Britain had had hundreds of regional cheeses. It emerged with a handful.

Almost everything you can buy now was rebuilt from nothing, by a small number of people, from the 1970s onwards.

Verdict

Excellent, cheap, and you will take more plates than you meant to.

That is not an accident.

Asha Mwangi

Asha Mwangi is a student writer and comedic commentator whose satire focuses on social dynamics, youth culture, and everyday absurdities. Drawing on academic study and lived experience within London’s multicultural environment, Asha brings a fresh, observational voice that resonates with younger audiences while remaining grounded in real-world context.

Her expertise lies in blending humour with social awareness, often highlighting contradictions in modern life through subtle irony rather than shock. Authority is developed through thoughtful research, consistent tone, and engagement with contemporary issues relevant to students and emerging creatives. Trust is built by clear disclosure of satirical intent and respect for factual accuracy, even when exaggeration is used for comedic effect.

Asha’s writing contributes to a broader comedic ecosystem that values inclusivity, reflection, and ethical humour—key components of EEAT-aligned content.