The cheese toastie is part of the staple diet of students, full as it is with delicious salt, fat, and beer-absorbing carbohydrate. Mitchell Riek, Taylor Tabb, and Evan Hill from Carnegie Mellon University in the USA have taken this one step further with an automatic cheese toast-making machine.

A vacuum system lifts a slice of bread into place, followed by a slice of cheese and another slice of bread; the assembled sandwich is pushed into a grilling machine. Then, when it’s done, a second lever pushes the finished snack into a delivery slot. It even squirts butter onto the surfaces in contact with the heated grill.