We’ve all come through on the other side of the pizza delivery from hell and lived to tell the tale. Waiting 90 minutes for an expensive slice only to scrape the tepid cheese off the top of the box was enough to make some California entrepreneurs seek out a new approach to the entire process. Was there a way to improve the quality and speed of a typical pizza delivery, without adding costs to the already mounting fees for food, tax, delivery, and tip?
Meet Zume Pizza, a startup launched in 2015 by two friends who brought artificial intelligence and robotics to the pizza biz. Business Insider describes Zume as looking more like a manufacturing plant than a pizza joint. The company has no front-of-house – it’s all delivery – and the bulk of the pizza-making responsibility has been delegated to robots.
Speed is a huge factor in the shift. Zume’s kitchen can reportedly drop 370 pizzas in an hour and cut delivery times to anywhere from five to 20 minutes.
Automation partner ABB Robotics helped design the doughbot, which presses out a ball of dough in nine seconds before sending it down a conveyor line to be slathered in sauce. After the sauce is spread, a human worker takes care of the application of toppings and cheese, a part of the process that doesn’t lend itself well to automation just yet due to the differing sizes and weights of what’s being applied.
But once topped, a robot named Vincenzo slips the pizza in an oven, and after it bakes to bubbly perfection, workers slide it into Zume’s proprietary self-cleaning pizza slicer.
The company says its 14-inch pizzas are all within the $10 and $20 range, which includes delivery. They also stress that Zume is a no-tipping business and that they pay their workers fair wages – including health insurance – so you don’t have to.
But this next part is my favorite: Zume’s delivery vehicle is a pizza-emblazoned RV, and it’s stocked inside with 56 ovens. If you live further than 12 minutes from their operations, Zume packs your pizza partially cooked into one of these ovens, so it finishes baking on the way.
And back to the claim of five-minute deliveries – well this is where the artificial intelligence comes in. Zume says a few years of customer data was enough for it to be able to predict, in large part, what kinds of pizzas will be consumed where. Because we’re creatures of habit, I guess. During certain peak hours, it sends its delivery trucks stocked with these standard issue pies, and as soon as you press “submit” on your online order, Zume is ready for you with a piping hot pizza.
Sound too good to be true? Well, for most of America it is. Zume currently reaches just a small region near its Silicon Valley headquarters. But that could change, as its recently been reported that SoftBank is in talks to invest $750 million into the pizza company and Zume says they are working their hardest to expand.
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