Zume, a new startup trying to make a more profitable pizza through robotics
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
"""
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...
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.
on a different note, mini pizza ovens seem to be the best part of this startup, seems as though it could be a great product when combined with 'artisinal robot made' frozen pizza.
At precisely 3 minutes and 15 seconds before
arriving at the customer's location, the cloud
commands the oven to turn on and--" Garden made
the symbol of a large explosion emanating from
his brain-- "BOOM, the customer gets a fresh,
out-the-oven pizza delivered to their door."
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.
Technology got better, and cheaper. That puts previously-unattainable goals within reach.
Would you argue that a $15/hour McDonald's employee will be cost-competitive with a Big Mac machine nowadays?
Far as machines, depends on how cost of installation, maintenance, and licensing vs humans it replaces. Varies case by case.
The bigger point (and the dirty secret of globalism) is that nobody can really afford labor, especially multinationals.
0. http://www.inquisitr.com/1594675/mcdonalds-counters-minimum-...
That's a lie they tell you. McDonalds may not to some degree. I've worked with many companies that are low-margin, including food companies. The low-cost, food industry is tough enough that tradeoffs can be harsh. $15 might be too much to ask for them. But better than minimum wage, crazy scheduling (below), pushing them to skip breaks, and so on? Yeah, they can do it but don't want to. What's common in most of these are tons of highly-paid, corporate people with expenses, catered meetings, jets, 8-digit CEO's, and so on. Almost all I've ever worked for could afford all that but not labor that generates revenue. Strange, eh?
https://populardemocracy.org/sites/default/files/HarpersMaga...
Anyway, I like citing rebels from low-margin industries to disprove the general claim that people can't be paid well. I mean, we had an article on Hacker News recently showing all the big companies used to do it but switched to a shareholder focus. But what about companies making pennies on the dollar? Two favorites:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2013/07/24/the-wal-...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/19/reasons-love-costco...
These companies operate in a very-rough industry where margins usually range from below 1 to about 3.5% for Walmart. Most companies in it are clear people can't and shouldn't be paid almost anything unless they're management, executives, or board members. Yet, these two do the opposite with more profit as a result than most of them. Also show you can get good executives in 6-digit range instead of 8-digits. Lean, too, with Publix having a 200 to 1 worker to manager ratio without breaking a sweat. Motivated people and their supervisors, esp with financial stake in earnings, tend to manage themselves mostly.
So, even if I conceded McDonalds after seeing detailed accounting, I'd still like to take a closer look at the books and management practices of most of these other companies that say they can't afford labor. I think they probably can if a lower-margin business can. Just a hunch.
http://www.pizzatoday.com/departments/back-office/2013-march...
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.
What's an industrial robot? Why is a fully-automated assembly line not considered robotic?
http://www.refrigeratedfrozenfood.com/articles/83570-pizza-p...
Thats a human made, human served pizza. How is this pie equivalent in price to the more premium pizza I can have across the street at Round Table, also served and made by humans?
It doesn't add up.
- How much power (or propane or whatever) do you need to run these ovens?
- How much heat they emit in the truck, as a waste? Looks like some cooling is required. How much power for that.
- What is the power source for the above items. Fuel, propane, batteries?
- It kind of looks dangerous to have fuel or propane or batteries next to a bunch of running ovens? If so, where to put the fuel and where to put the engine.
- Having flammable cardboard where the ovens are looks too dangerous. How do they get the pizza from the oven to the cardboard? I hope it's not the poor driver squeezing between a bunch of running ovens to get to the right one and get the pizza out?
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.
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.
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!).
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?
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.
Unfortunately, there is no way to prevent this process, heat retaining delivery bag or no. You just have to get it and eat it fast :)
There are dozens of pizza spots within a couple of miles of me. The ones that are my gotos for delivery are not the ones I'd go to in person and vice versa. The best pizzas are in the latter category, but getting those delivery quickly moves them very far down the rankings.
https://youtu.be/rajNU2gels0?t=21
There are even pizza vending machines that are doing the dough too and the result doesn't look horrible:
$20 delivery for this quality and size is pretty decent/normal in SF.
I just hope nobody from Zume reads this and intentionally sabotages today's pizza.
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.
Complaining about the latter makes you sound xenophobic.
http://www.unz.com/gnxp/norway-offers-migrants-a-lesson-no-r...
> Migrants themselves can often be quite frank and astute observers of cross-cultural differences:
> “Men have weaknesses and when they see someone smiling it is difficult to control,” Mr. Kelifa said, explaining that in his own country, Eritrea, “if someone wants a lady he can just take her and he will not be punished,” at least not by the police.
Outsourcing would be a much closer parallel.
On the other hand, immigrants interact with the country they migrate to in a whole bunch of ways. E.g. someone who earns below minimum wage is very unlikely to pay taxes that account for their increased burden on the government. This issue is often ignored by pro-immigration economists who only consider some narrowly defined set of govt services like welfare. Furthermore (and I acknowledge that here I am going against mainstream economic opinion) economists often justify immigration using ponzi-scheme like logic [1]: even if the immigrant is a net economic negative, they are younger and therefore are a net positive while they are working, and presumably even more immigration in the future will pay for this generation's retirement.
[1] Technically this is referred to as "overlapping generation" models. While these models are not all ponzi-like, a lot of the popular models assume that the net production of humankind for all time has infinite present value, so we can borrow a (finite) amount from the infinite future and make everyone better off.
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.
Also, it's already been established that Silicon Valley is not so happy with the government, so displacing an entire working class and making them dependent on the government would grant the government a power that seems against SV's interests.
Keep in mind the class distinction between someone working for the government on their own volition (police officers, military, etc), versus someone using it as a resort-- welfare recipients, SSI, veterans, etc.
The other thing to keep in mind, when you work for a company, at least in theory you hold a leverage of being able to quit and go to another job. If you're getting checks from the government (and possibly not working), you lose this leverage.
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.
This doesn't address the joblessness concern. The trend I see taking root in its infancy today is job stability tending to flow increasingly only to highly-skilled and highly-experienced staff, and many times not even that imparts stability. This has downstream impacts upon complexity management, retention, etc. that are out of scope of discussion in a format as limited as HN.
The game changer is that software and computationally-enhanced hardware delivers the ability to re-use pre-existing infrastructure. Earlier transitions at least required significant infrastructure changes and/or outright new infrastructure be built, and that formed the opportunity and basis for disrupted workers to work within the transition. We might be talking about a Zume that requires new infrastructure today, but make no mistake, a solution reusing pre-existing infrastructure as-is will come down the pipeline. This yanks out the traditional "relief valve" of earlier large-scale technological transitions' disruptive patterns.
When we replaced horses with cars, there was massive infrastructure added for roads, roadside entertainment, oil and oil refining distribution-to-retailing, pipelines, eventually shipping, oil discovery, etc.
When we replaced steno pools with word processors, the "infrastructure" was basic typing skills (shorthand skills were dispensed with, to our detriment IMHO) imposed upon a new generation of workers as a new baseline skill (along with many other baseline skill upgrades with no commensurate increase in wages over the past decades, I might add). The physical infrastructure of steno pools however, was repurposed.
When we replaced the extra cashier at gas stations with card-accepting gas pumps, the infrastructure initially rode on the back of the pre-existing telephone network, then upon the new data networks. The major infrastructure replaced was the gas pumps themselves, and usually only as they gradually wore out so the infrastructure draw for new labor was a net negative when the lost cashier jobs' hours were taken into account.
When we eventually replace the plurality of in-house small-business system administrators with cloud-based services, the physical footprint of the servers will be re-purposed to maybe a storage closet.
We're also using metrics in this discussion the wrong way. Instead of talking about number of jobs lost/gained, we should be talking about absolute wages over time and per capita, with an additional factor expressing stability over long periods. Using number of jobs as the metric loses information about the quality of the jobs, stability over working life, and dispersion of the quality and stability throughout the general working population. If we are being honest with ourselves within the software industry, then we are major enablers to devolving the quality and stability of what jobs that do exist. For example, through the delivery of software that enables decision makers to take what used to be highly unprofitable processes of manually scheduling staff and following up attendance to ensure only part-time employment, and making it not only feasible, but highly profitable.
> 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...
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).
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.
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.
I'd gladly eat robot pizza, though. Good luck to these guys.
So pizza nerds are not their intended market.
http://recipes.howstuffworks.com/tools-and-techniques/tossin...
1: https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/i07.f8rTkb8...
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?
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.
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.
http://marketrealist.com/2015/03/dominos-pizza-serving-1-5-m...
I agree with the spirit of the poster. Nobody's going to lose sleep with anticipation for a cheaper McDonalds (that delivers!).
There is a nice saying that is apropos - "pizza is like sex, even when it is bad, it is still pretty good."
Pizza is very regional and if you're in an unfamiliar place, you take a risk by going to a small "artisanal" pizzeria. Considering that they have such a large market share, their pizza can't be that if that's what millions of Americans prefer. It's also similar to the style of pizza many American's had growing up. Taste is subjective afterall
Some fast chains like In-n-Out burger are pretty good in my eyes but generally I'll take my chances with reliable looking local food in most cases. I rarely regret it.
I get that everyone in Silicon Valley right now is obsessed with unfictionalizing Snow Crash, but the best way to make cheap food is to buy real food and learn how to cook it. There's a discount grocery store a block away and I frequently buy Actual Food there for prices that even a robot welding machine programmed to move pizzas around can't compete with.
Don't pretend this stuff doesn't affect me. People "free willing to choose" to ruin their health on trash food (among other things) drives up the cost of everyone's health insurance, punishing everybody so a few players in the junk food industry can cash in. My insurance now costs 35% of my rent, this is not a minor problem. A similar situation is where Walmart abuses government welfare to underpay their workers. There are social consequences to "innovations" like this that are not exclusively individual.
I get excited to see economic investments put into improving people's health and increasing their longevity, not destroying them mentally and physically with addictive garbage. I'm not saying we make it illegal, but I see no reason to get excited about investing into it. This new company is not innovative in the slightest. It's a continuation of the industrial revolution trying to figure out how to turn plastic into food and make us crave it, while in the process automating out every single last worker.
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.
People who like pizza tend to prefer local varieties that are unique to their area, at least that's been my experience.
Now they use a conveyor belt convection oven which requires very little skill but it's like baking the pizza under a big hair dryer. It dries out the crust more, and they had to change the dough with additives to reduce bubbles. The result was a lower quality pizza, less flavorful crust, that required less skill to bake. For them a win, I guess.