
Silicon Valley has a new vision for the pizzeria. It involves lots of robots - ytNumbers
http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-zume-pizza-automation-20170706-story.html
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Mikeb85
Sounds like a really, really over-engineered solution. Especially since, as
the article states, people want hand-crafted food nowadays.

The pizzerias that are thriving right now are the ones making neapolitan style
pizza in wood ovens, Pizza Hut and Little Caesars barely exist around here
anymore.

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thieving_magpie
"Around here" being the operative words. For those of us that choose to not
live in urban environments, hand-crafted foods are much more scarce. I think
there's a pretty large market for these guys to pop up stores in cities that
aren't close to large cities.

And if they can get their costs down with automation I'm sure they'd find a
way to make a profit in urban areas as well. After some time at the brewery, a
$3.50 pizza is pretty attractive.

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Mikeb85
Not sure how much food costs are where you live, but a $3.50 pizza isn't
possible here. The ingredient cost is too high.

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adwi
In the NYC area there are a few bars that give you a free small pizza with
every $5 pint all day every day. Pretty decent too.

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idiocratic
Wait a second... these guys make supermarket-grade pizza using "Jira and
Kanban"?! This world has some serious problems.

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Miserlou57
I got a good laugh seeing them using a $100,000+ 6-axis automotive assembly-
line robot to move a pizza 90 degrees from a conveyor to an oven. Overkill to
say the least. This is laughably overengineered.

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joezydeco
Especially since most chain pizza places use a conveyor oven to cook the
thing.

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losteverything
At the Stern school, first term part time MBA students were told to go to the
streets and observe pizza places (so many in the city). Come back and build a
business plan.

Wasn't long before students saw how much there was to be made on a slice and
that cheese is the most expensive part of the pie.

Personally, perhaps because of the population of Italian heritage near me, I
simply avoid pizza places that seem like a business, not a life vocation.

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colmcg
At least around me, the small Pizzerias don't have much turnover. It's the
same two or three guys running the place year in and out (but that's in the
Hudson Valley/NYC area).

I guess this would be attractive to Dominos or Pizza Hut.

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zitterbewegung
This seems like an overengineered problem for food. I don't get how all of the
capital expense can be justified for the ever slimming margins of food
production? Do they plan to scale it up? Others have mentioned pizza factories
and wouldn't that be their competition? I don't get it.

~~~
draw_down
I never understood why minimum wage labor was so expensive for fast food or
pizza places, and that's pretty much what they're eliminating here.

Maybe the answer is that margins are so slim in the food business that any
significant reduction in cost is bigger than it appears?

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eli_gottlieb
>Maybe the answer is that margins are so slim in the food business that any
significant reduction in cost is bigger than it appears?

Seems so. We've got people saying labor is the biggest cost for a restaurant
or pizzeria, but that necessitates asking: holy shit, how can the value-add of
a fresh, hot pizza over its unprepared ingredients be _so low_ that it's worth
cutting wages to below $8/hour by robotizing the work? If pizza really takes
that much value as input, why does it have so little value as output?

~~~
dragonwriter
> We've got people saying labor is the biggest cost for a restaurant or
> pizzeria, but that necessitates asking: holy shit, how can the value-add of
> a fresh, hot pizza over its unprepared ingredients be so low that it's worth
> cutting wages to below $8/hour by robotizing the work?

In a competitive market, it's always worth reducing the cost of inputs. The
restaurant business is generally a competitive market (it's actually a bit
_worse_ than an ideal competitive market for participants, because there are
usually lots of unsustainable competitors selling below cost and losing
money.)

~~~
eli_gottlieb
>(it's actually a bit worse than an ideal competitive market for participants,
because there are usually lots of unsustainable competitors selling below cost
and losing money.)

 _This_ sounds like the problem. Shouldn't the government do something about
these anticompetitive practices? I don't think a good economy involves
"charities" driving the restaurant business to extinction.

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sokoloff
There are many Walter Mittys out "playing restauranteur" and no, I don't think
the government should be in the business of telling people they're bad at
business and stopping them from doing it. It's not like the local restaurant
of the day is going to dump food on the market in mass quantities hoping to
create and exploit a monopoly later.

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kalleboo
This already exists in vending machine form, saw one of these in a supermarket
in Greece
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7_lxiU8eLM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7_lxiU8eLM)

~~~
throwaway2016a
This is pretty awesome. As someone who makes pizza at home about once a week I
have a few minor observations:

1\. Only flour and water in the dough? What about yeast and salt?

2\. Whenever I make pizza the dough is rather sticky. I wonder how they keep
the parks from being clogged up by sticky dough.

As a complete aside, having tried both Italian pizza in Italy and americanized
pizza I actually prefer American style with it's more cheese, more sauce, and
diced meets instead of whole slices. But I'm sure it is also way more
calories.

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Cthulhu_
Now I wonder if there would be a business in just putting frozen pizzas in the
oven and having those delivered.

Could put the oven on the back of the delivery scooters they use around here
for fresh-out-the-oven pizza.

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fiftyacorn
How does this compare to pizza factories?

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tyingq
I would guess they could borrow a few ideas from the frozen pizza industry.
But the scale is very different, and frozen pizza factories don't have the
oven to deal with.

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forgotmyhnacc
This is a submarine article
([http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)),
an ad for zume pizza. Food manufacturers already have frozen pizza down to a
precise science, and automate more than this startup. I've been watching the
food technology space for some time, and this companys only innovation is
putting pizza ovens in delivery trucks.

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vorpalhex
If you think frozen pizza is a replacement for freshly made pizza (regardless
of what makes it), then you must not have any taste buds.

A fresh pizza has qualities in the dough and especially in the meats that just
don't carry over to a frozen pizza. One is a proper dinner, the other is a
backup plan.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Still, like sex, even bad pizza is good.

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Upvoter33
anyone here ever had a cappuccino from a machine? if they can't get that
right, doubt that robopizza is coming any time soon, at least in any big way.

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jackyinger
Get back to me when robots have the same level of sass as my goto pie place.
Not to mention kitchen bs-ing.

Technically, it sounds like it's a pain in the but.

How much better is a machine made pizza if it's not been frozen?

