
Zume, a new startup trying to make a more profitable pizza through robotics - mathattack
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-24/inside-silicon-valley-s-robot-pizzeria
======
wyc
Just looking at the delivery/cooking truck, I'm suddenly reminded of the
opening chapter in Snow Crash:

"""

The analysts at CosaNostra Pizza University concluded that it was just human
nature and you couldn't fix it, and so they went for a quick cheap technical
fix: smart boxes. The pizza box is a plastic carapace now, corrugated for
stiffness, a little LED readout glowing on the side, telling the Deliverator
how many trade imbalanceproducing minutes have ticked away since the fateful
phone call. There are chips and stuff in there. The pizzas rest, a short stack
of them, in slots behind the Deliverator's head. Each pizza glides into a slot
like a circuit board into a computer, clicks into place as the smart box
interfaces with the onboard system of the Deliverator's car. The address of
the caller has already been inferred from his phone number and poured into the
smart box's builtin RAM. From there it is communicated to the car, which
computes and projects the optimal route on a heads-up display, a glowing
colored map traced out against the windshield so that the Deliverator does not
even have to glance down.

"""

[https://chnm.gmu.edu/courses/omalley/120f02/victory/snowcras...](https://chnm.gmu.edu/courses/omalley/120f02/victory/snowcrash.html)

------
mmanfrin
Puff piece -- the idea of cooking pizzas in a truck is a good one, but the
whole 'robotics' angle is a little trite. The only automated part seemed to be
the sauce (which Costco does) and moving the pizza to the oven.

I like the moving-pizza-truck idea, it's a shame this had to go the route of
'robotic pizzeria' since it's so blatantly a puff piece.

~~~
TheMagicHorsey
You beat me to it. I agree.

I think this article is actually more interesting because it shows you
something about how a good tech PR strategy works. Bloomberg undoubtedly saw,
on-site, how ridiculous the robotics narrative was, but they went with it
anyways, because it makes for a more viral story. This kind of PR is a
collaborative effort and win-win.

If you have a tech startup you should really think about the narrative before
you call in press. Think about what the audience wants from a story, and sell
that. The goal of PR is to get your company noticed ... so long as you don't
turn off genuine customers, you can actually go pretty far away from reality
before the average user picks up on the fact that the story is mostly
bullshit.

I think they should have kept the CEO out of this video. He comes across as a
bit too much of a shuckster. A CTO type would have been a better type. Also,
instead of positioning the business as increased profit, he should have
presented the reduction in labor costs as savings for the customer. That
always makes a better story. The CEO's brain probably doesn't work that way,
but the PR firm he hired should have given him that tip.

~~~
colinplamondon
This is national media, for a local business - the audience of this is 100%
investors, for the round they mention raising.

------
scottlocklin
This is either going to end up dominating the food delivery business
(unlikely, but possible) or present yet another case study in Silicon Valley
delusions.

It's entirely possible, easy even, to automate the pizza making process. You
can go to the grocery store and purchase frozen pizzas which have never been
touched by human hands. Exactly none of them are made by industrial robots.
Industrial robots cost more than a pizza assembly line does, and they don't do
anything that the line can't do. The only way this could make sense is if they
could get them robots to make lots of other things, but, well "best of luck
with that." At $18 for a pizza, they obviously aren't saving enough money on
labor to pass this on to consumers.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> You can go to the grocery store and purchase frozen pizzas which have never
> been touched by human hands. Exactly none of them are made by industrial
> robots. Industrial robots cost more than a pizza assembly line does, and
> they don't do anything that the line can't do.

What's an industrial robot? Why is a fully-automated assembly line not
considered robotic?

~~~
JoeAltmaier
I think it is - anything that measures and responds is 'robotic'.

[http://www.refrigeratedfrozenfood.com/articles/83570-pizza-p...](http://www.refrigeratedfrozenfood.com/articles/83570-pizza-
processing-spotlight)

------
tansey
I guess I don't understand what is really novel about this. Don't brands like
Digiorno and Freschetta already have highly-optimized pizza assembly lines? Is
it really that hard to make the topping/sauce dispensing dynamic instead of
static?

I also don't understand the appeal of having the pizza be super hot-n-ready.
If you have an efficient baking-to-delivery pipeline, and an insulated
container for the pizza, then how much are you really improving the quality?
Ten minutes of sitting still in an insulated bag is fine with me.

And how do they handle the hand-off issue with an AUV? You get a notification
and then the car sits there waiting to deliver the pizza for several minutes
while you walk outside? At that point, the pizza is just as cold as it would
have been if you had a human bring one to your door-- and at least the latter
doesn't make you put on shoes.

Just seems fraught with issues that really require what you might call "AUV-
complete" or "robot-complete" tech. If you have a very smart, powerful drone
that is capable of picking up a pizza, keeping it warm, and effectively
delivering it to people's doors with 99.99% reliability, then this sounds
obvious. Otherwise, this seems like an idea that's too soon to succeed.

~~~
vessenes
So if you are a deep pizza nerd, the pitch that you'd have a neo-neapolitan
style pizza at your door in short order is a great pitch.

The issue with fulfilling this pitch is that pizzaiolos are expensive, hot
ovens are hard to get close to people, etc. etc. Trying to solve all this is
probably at one level a 'passion project' for a Valley engineer.

A true 90 second Neapolitan pizza does not age that well, the crust is going
to be soft under the tomato sauce, and it will get a bit nasty if it sits
long. It's supposed to be oven to plate to mouth very quickly.

On the other hand, could this be a business, not a passion project? Most
restaurant gross margin is under 50%, declining the fancier the restaurant.
That's before labor and other fixed costs, meaning restaurants are generally a
pennies business.

Pizza though, pizza has like 90% gross margin. If you could get rid of labor,
you'd have a huge advantage economically against competitors.

~~~
jonknee
> Pizza though, pizza has like 90% gross margin. If you could get rid of
> labor, you'd have a huge advantage economically against competitors.

That's true, but this company looks like they have a lot more labor than a
typical pizza chain. If you ever watch a big chain make pies it is
astonishingly fast, way faster than this "robot" version (which is really not
robotic at all, there are so many people involved!).

~~~
ams6110
Disagree. I worked at a Dominos franchise for a couple of years. It didn't
make much money. Delivery pizza is insanely competitive and relies heavily on
discounts and coupons. Most of the labor cost is the delivery personnel who
can realistically on average make about three or four round-trips an hour. You
need a lot more drivers than you need in-store personnel and I would doubt
that the amortized cost of a robot kitchen is much less than a minimum-wage
human.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> Most of the labor cost is the delivery personnel who can realistically on
> average make about three or four round-trips an hour.

This sounds high to me. Just to be clear, are you talking about one trip out
delivering to four different addresses before returning, or four trips out
each to a single address all within one hour?

~~~
ams6110
I guess it could vary a lot depending on how the store is set up. We had a
limited delivery area that was generally no more than 10 minutes drive radius
from the store. At the time we had a 30 minute guarantee so we tried to get
the pizza made and out of the store in less than 15 minutes. Anything that
went out over 20 minutes old was likely to be a giveaway.

So, 10 minutes out and 10 back is 3 round trips an hour. Often you could take
more than one order per trip if the locations were along the same route.

Many common delivery locations were well under 10 minutes from the store so on
average 3/4 runs per hour was possible for an experienced driver who knew the
area and didn't get lost -- we had no mobile phones or navigation devices --
and didn't waste time.

------
ojbyrne
I tried this, as they had a coupon for a free pizza in Mountain View. The
pizza was just ok, and considering the many choices around here for really
good pizza, I probably won't actually pay for one of theirs unless I have some
indication that the quality has improved.

~~~
azinman2
That's what I care about. Interesting to hear it's only ok. There's another
startup called pi (app is now called Pythagoras) that's also trying to
reinvent much about pizza, and theirs is currently my fav pizza in SF
(certainly for delivery). Plus it's delivered within 15 min from request!

~~~
sharemywin
as far as I can tell they arn't doing much from an automation side other than
contracting with a kitchen and using an app with UberRush. Also, there
charging $20 for a pizza with a very small deliveyr area.

~~~
azinman2
Don't know about automation (unimportant to me) but boxes are specially
designed with a non-standard material, pizzas are premade and par-baked
earlier in the day so that they can do last 3 min and then deliver to you
(within 15 min), centralize the initial cooking then decentralize the last for
faster delivery, have 15 min delivery at all, pizza dough has been researched
with former head Google chef for what works best with their pre-cooking
method, they only have 3 kinds of pizza in order to make all this work, and
various other things along the chain.

$20 delivery for this quality and size is pretty decent/normal in SF.

------
deveshparekh
The kitchen opens today at noon. Instead of speculating about whether having
an oven in the delivery truck makes a better pizza, I'll order a pizza today
and then order the exact same pizza in August when they start using their oven
truck and see if I notice any difference. If anybody else wants to try, you
can use my referral code
([https://zumepizza.com/#/r/593698](https://zumepizza.com/#/r/593698)), which
will give you a free pizza and give me a free pizza credit to fund the August
portion of my experiment.

I just hope nobody from Zume reads this and intentionally sabotages today's
pizza.

------
coherentpony
I'm genuinely curious, what's the difference between robots replacing American
jobs and foreigners replacing American jobs?

Politicians go to great lengths to protect the sanctity of American jobs by
passing strict immigration regulations and instantiating border checkpoints
hundreds of miles inside the border. They don't seem to be mirroring their
actions for robots.

~~~
grondilu
> what's the difference between robots replacing American jobs and foreigners
> replacing American jobs?

Complaining about the latter makes you sound xenophobic.

~~~
goldenkey
Its less about xenonorphism and more about lower standards and willingness to
work for wages that require 5 people to share an apartment.

------
jostmey
Wow, they have a hose that sprays out pizza sauce and a way of putting a pizza
in an oven. So how much are they saving in labor cost?

~~~
jonknee
From the video it appears your stereotypical stoned college student working
the late shift at Dominos could make pizzas at about 5-10x the rate of that
robot assisted assembly line. Their "automated" method uses more people than a
manual operation!

------
bko
I think the upside of this method is not only the efficiency of reducing the
human labor cost, but the consistency of eating something made by robots.
Above all else, many Americans prefer consistency, which helps explain the
popularity of many chain restaurants. Companies like Starbucks and McDonalds
go to great efforts to ensure product control and proper training with minimal
variability in the product quality. Also other exciting options include A/B
testing which can provide a better feedback loop than manually tinkering and
trying to tease out consumer preference.

------
whyenot
A consumer isn't going to care about the automation. Does the pizza taste
good? I'm especially interested in how these "mobile ovens" will work out. If
a delivery is 1 mile away vs 5 miles away, length of time in the oven will be
different, yet you don't want to deliver under-baked dough or something that
is burnt.

~~~
rm999
The video in the article says they automatically turn the oven on when they're
3 minutes from the delivery (they have like 50 ovens in the truck). I think
that's actually the coolest part of their idea.

~~~
jonknee
That many ovens seems ridiculous considering the pizzas need assembled and par
baked before getting loaded into the truck. If I order my pie I have to wait
until 50 other people get theirs, the driver returns to the store and loads up
another 50 and then I get mine?

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aestetix
So.... when all the people who were cooking the pizzas are out of work, who
will be left to buy the pizzas? The same goes for all low wage jobs that are
being automated away.

I'm not sure how many people have really thought through the long term
implications of what happens when you automate all the "grunt" work. As a
successful business, your income comes from customers. Your customers need to
make money somehow. All this automation seems like it will actually kill
market liquidity.

Edit: the obvious response is "a new market will move in. disrupting the old."
However, I don't think the radio->television (and so on) analogy actually
applies here, since it is demonstrable that there the new technologies
replaced old technologies, rather than employees.

~~~
navpatel
The same thing that happened to stable boys, bank tellers and farmers. In 1870
53% of the labour force were farmers, by 1970 that was 4.6%
([https://www.agclassroom.org/gan/timeline/farmers_land.htm](https://www.agclassroom.org/gan/timeline/farmers_land.htm)).
If you told someone in 1870s that 50% of the labour force will be changing
their job, they would have a similar reaction.

Granted the speed with which changes are occurring now is much more rapid; if
we consider the largest number of people affected in the smallest period of
time, it's probably self-driving cars & trucks that will make the greatest
impact.

Driving or making pizza isn't exactly high-skill work (in terms of time taken
on training), hopefully the transition happens slow enough for these people to
retrain for other work.

~~~
ec109695
The difference between then and now is that farm jobs weren't replaced by jobs
that requires a college education.

------
hiou
That robotic arm is the salary of a dominos employee for 10+ years.

~~~
bko
Source?

> How Much Do New Robots Cost? Complete with controllers and teach pendants,
> new industrial robotics cost from $50,000 to $80,000. Once application-
> specific peripherals are added, the robot system costs anywhere from
> $100,000 to $150,000. Reconditioned robots are a less expensive option.
> Typically, used robots cost half as much as new robots. Used robot prices
> can range between an estimated $25,000 and $40,000, and systems with
> application components cost between $50,000 and $75,000.

Just checked out a random pizza hut and seems to be open 11 AM - 10 PM daily
or 11 hours a day or 77 hours a week or 4,000 hours a year. That'll cost about
30k a year at minimum wage not counting overtime, training, hiring cost,
taxes, etc.

[0] [https://www.robots.com/faq/show/how-much-do-industrial-
robot...](https://www.robots.com/faq/show/how-much-do-industrial-robots-cost)

~~~
ams6110
What you're leaving out is that the robot can only do one thing. The Dominos
employee can do whatever is necessary including cleaning, restocking
ingredients, handling customer/delivery issues, etc.

Also if the robot breaks down or otherwise stops working properly it's costing
you anywhere from $250-$1000/hr in lost business plus cost of emergency
repairs (robot techs on call at 10pm are generally not making minimum wage).

------
anonbanker
I was planning on doing exactly this idea in the next 3-5 years, and had told
nobody about it. I considered pizza made on the way to the customer's door to
be the ultimate realization of our Snow Crash future, but without all the
human-related problems that come with it. Plus, one could probably
clone/license Jeff Varasano's recipe[0], and deliver a better product to the
customer.

Unfortunately this means that Domino's will be competing in the space very
soon, which I hoped would be open for disruption for another few years; but at
least I have the comfort that comes from knowing that Canada is 5-10 years
behind trends, even with multinational corporations (Apple Pay _just_ got
here, for instance), giving me plenty of time to get a Blue Ocean strategy
developed while everyone fights over small parts of the (ahem) pie.

If Zume moves to Canada rapidly, I'll definitely start to sweat. Right now,
I'll be cheering them on while sitting on the sidelines. The sooner that crap
pizzas like Dominos or Pizza Hut are outclassed by smaller startups the way
that Uber outclassed taxi companies, the better we all are as a society.

0\.
[http://www.varasanos.com/PizzaRecipe.htm](http://www.varasanos.com/PizzaRecipe.htm)

------
dsr_
They shouldn't want to be in the pizza business. They should want to be in the
pizza-robot (-truck, etc.) business.

Actually opening a restaurant and serving pizzas is not a path to riches, even
if you can trade all your labor costs for capital investment in a lease. This
restaurant is/should be just a proof of concept. The route to wealth is having
other people buy your equipment to set up their own robopizza shops, all over
the world.

------
exDM69
Does anyone know how much automation is happening at a frozen pizza
bakery/factory? The bakery industry has fairly elaborate robotics already, the
ones in the video don't seem that revolutionary to me compared to an episode
of "How it's made".

I'd gladly eat robot pizza, though. Good luck to these guys.

------
Aelinsaar
So basically, it's the tech for a high-volume operation, without the volume?
Oh SF...

------
hokkos
Look like an inefficient frozen pizza factory like here
[https://youtu.be/ElQG6ZYR4zg](https://youtu.be/ElQG6ZYR4zg)

------
batbomb
Not sure what this does that Costco doesn't already do

------
nier
Going into the article, I was very curious how they would handle the dough. It
seems to me the video shows they are simply pressing it flat.

So pizza nerds are not their intended market.

[http://recipes.howstuffworks.com/tools-and-
techniques/tossin...](http://recipes.howstuffworks.com/tools-and-
techniques/tossing-a-pizza-101.htm)

------
some1else
So, the industrial robot hand, nicknamed Bruno[1], withdraws the pizza from
the conveyor belt and places it in the oven.

1:
[https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/i07.f8rTkb8...](https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/i07.f8rTkb8w/v0/-999x-999.gif)

------
xivzgrev
He wants to take over pizza delivery industry but charges $18 for a pizza?
Dominoes charges something like $10 for 2 mediums. The pizza delivery market
is about acceptable quality, fast delivery, and low prices. Is he doing the
elon musk strategy, where eventually he will undercut dominoes on price?

------
cgcardona
In other words an assembly line?

What about the machine learning algos which suggest pizzas based on previous
purchases. What about the convolutional networks to recognize that each spray
of sauce is truly unique and 'artisanal?'

Where was the speech recognition for ordering and the oven encapsulating drone
delivery swarm?

------
kneel
>Alex Garden. Garden, 41, is the former president of Zynga Studios. Before
that, he was a general manager of Microsoft's Xbox Live.

Xbox? Zynga? This company will have us buying $10 pizza-points for pies that
cost $7. Also you could sign up for credit cards to get coupons.

------
ghaff
> "Just imagine Domino's without the labor component," said Garden. "You can
> start to see how incredibly profitable that can be."

So that quote leads me to imagine crappy pizza that's maybe a little cheaper
than other crappy pizza. Doesn't exactly make me want to rush out and try it.

~~~
bko
It appears that millions of Americans prefer Dominos pizza considering they
command 25% of the US pizza delivery market and sell 1.5 mm pies a day. Sorry
their pizza isn't up to your standards.

[http://marketrealist.com/2015/03/dominos-pizza-
serving-1-5-m...](http://marketrealist.com/2015/03/dominos-pizza-
serving-1-5-million-pies-day/)

~~~
throwawaysocks
_> prefer Dominos_

IDK. I order Dominos a lot because I sometimes work weird hours and literally
nothing else that delivers is open. That doesn't mean I _prefer_ Dominos. I
definitely don't. But it delivers to a large geographic region almost 24/7.

~~~
bko
It sounds like you prefer Dominos for their delivery service, hours and
geographic region.

~~~
throwawaysocks
That's an excellent example of a technical truth.

------
simbalion
Not to rain on the parade but terrible brand Dominos invented the robotic
pizza kitchen, not these guys.

