Even call it a "robot" pizza company is strange...I can't imagine that the inside of any factory for frozen pizzas would look that different than what this company was offering.
Very different. Frozen pizza factories are impressively efficient (with decades old tech).
Compare random frozen pizza machine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7anib2L7uUk with the hilarity that is Zume https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFSdxwRVh8A
Serious question: would this investment have been awarded if the cofounder weren't a minority female?
I have to believe they bought it with the idea of doing much much more but hadn't figured out how.
Overall, it seems they knew they wanted to "automate pizza" but really had no idea how. Another comment shows a real pizza assembly line that looks both simple and efficient.
Lets talk a minute about their "mobile ovens". WTH do they need 56 ovens for? It seems like assembly still has to happen at a "hub", but how many pizzas do you really need to bake on the way? Maybe a max of 10 for huge orders?
> Serious question: would this investment have been awarded if the cofounder weren't a minority female?
Lets not go there.
And didn't bother to do a simple Youtube search, watch one of the "how it's done" programs on TV, or talk to someone in the industry.
Being a little bit more active in my local start-up scene now also means following stat-ups in general. And a lot of these companies, including one I used to work for for a short period, seem to ignore lessons other learned, the hard way. If these lessons are concerning your USP, ignore them, because it is where you inovate. regardless, you should have understood these lessons before ignoring them.
Ignoring these lessons in any other part of your company is just stupid. Like not managing your cash flow.
The video gave me the impression of a kitchen designed by a chef or line cook, with a manufacturing robot tossed in there. If the goal was automated centralized production, any competent manufacturing engineer would have designed a radically simpler setup. Of course, finding machinery that didn't have a production capacity too far beyond Zume's needs would probably have been a challenge. Hundreds of pizzas an hour--let alone thousands--is well beyond anything Zume could have handled, because their biggest bottleneck would have always been delivery.
> Lets talk a minute about their "mobile ovens". WTH do they need 56 ovens for? It seems like assembly still has to happen at a "hub", but how many pizzas do you really need to bake on the way? Maybe a max of 10 for huge orders?
The entire concept is a bit wacky. You don't need to bake the pizza entirely on the way; just scale up how New York pizzerias handle pizza by the slice.[0] A plain pizza gets half-baked and when a customer orders a slice, toppings are added and it's put in the oven for a couple minutes until fully cooked. Prepping whole pizzas at a central kitchen and then putting them in a delivery van that finishes cooking the pizzas is something I could maybe see being viable with minimal investment. A very hesitant maybe.
But there are no robots and no wizards (er, machine learning some of Zume's early coverage discussed) for that kind of business. And that probably means no big investments as there are some articles where I can't help but substitute "magic" or "wizards" for certain words and think "yeah, that's probably closer to what some investors or journalists heard."
0. https://www.seriouseats.com/2018/10/new-york-pizza-slice-his...
"Bruno is a very powerful robot. He's a 6-axis robot. You've seen this kind of robot mostly in manufacturing settings. We're using this robot to make pizza."
Bruno then moves the pizza 5ft.
Yes of course. If you read the history, it was the male cofounder that was the “charisma” behind the business.
If anything the minority female is there as the token PR stunt.
I had family working in a plant for one of the big name pizza places, and you can see the whole process for on-demand pizza at many brick oven pizza joints. I don't know how you could go to either of those places, look at zume, then conclude that zume had any advantage or was solving a problem from either side (on demand or automation).
Thanks for the links. Indeed, hilarious to watch it side-by-side for some extra entertainment! With the volume of pizza they're making in that Zume factory, it doesn't seem like there's even any extra benefits of using robots — and these robots seem to be placed there more as an obstacle to overcome than actual help; also, they didn't even use it for cheese dispersement, which was still done by hand? LOL, robots-made pizza!
The six-axis robot being used to move a pizza 2 feet was pretty amazing -- I have to imagine they had grander plans but had no idea how to utilize it yet.
The mobile ovens are kind of absurd. I mean, warming it doesn't seem like a bad idea. Maybe even baking it on the way is fine (so long as all the toppings didn't slide off), but what do they need 56 bays for? If they're planning on loading up 56 pizzas and baking them on the way, latency on orders will be horrible. Huge orders are like, 10 pizzas. Seems like if they just baked them and stuffed them right into a warming compartment that'd be more than sufficient.
The saucing of the dough in particular was absolutely slower than a reasonably experienced human worker. For a human worker in a typical pizzeria, the sauce takes two seconds.
Useless in this application, but a lot of fun for an engineer to play with.
you mean other than the $375M you can walk away with by claiming you're using robots to make pizza.
Your insight re: the parallel to software design is a valuable one, thank you.
Sure, Rademaker doesn’t put their enormous frozen pizza technology in a van. But making pizza with robots? Dude, that’s been done before.
I bet if you gave them enough money to bother trying, they could squeeze a pizza machine into a van. Making a pizza in a van seems possible, but pointless.
To honest though, they look like fresh pizzas. And if by some chance, the system yields stable long term value (happy employees and eaters) then.. why not.
That said anybody gets depressed by the dehumanizing aspect of this era ? drone delivering robotically made pizzas.. it looked funny in the jetsons but in reality I'd like to keep the good'ol restaurants with noisy people in it.
[0] "that we have yet to master" because it's so useless and we're so unqualified to understand it
Has anyone explained to Zume that the restaurant business is low-margin?
Industrialization has pretty much solved mass production.
AI can automate intelligent decision making, but with industrialized production system the design has removed all need for intelligence.
An intelligent system will always be more expensive than a non intelligent system.
Robots could only become useful, once there are decisions to make. Like when you want to order truly customized pizzas, e.g., arrange the cheese such that it spells your name. Or give it a keyword, and then the robot should arrange all ingredients, such that the pizza looks like a painting about that keyword
I was like “oh these pizzas aren’t in a straight line, I wonder if a human needs to line them up now, or if there’s a visual sensor that detects edges”.
Then the simplicity of the solution blew my mind!