Fallen Pizza Startup Zume Shuts Down After Raising Millions | Hacker News Reader

Fallen Pizza Startup Zume Shuts Down After Raising Millions

bloomberg.com

31 pointsmirthlessend56 comments

Oh I remember this one, they had some very unnecessary looking robots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkhWonFm-Lw

Why would you use a robot that puts the pizza into the oven instead of putting the oven over the conveyer belt? I don't know what they actually did but I couldn't think of any other reason than use it to claim you use robots so you can pull money from investors who would like to invest in robots.

But maybe they had a reason for it, after all automated pizza production is nothing new. Right? Maybe it has something to do about baking it in trucks? Even then, it looks like a fake to me.

There seems to be some salvaged tech to be used. Like that pizza cutter ("robot") seems pretty neat.

I think for me, once I saw that the driver takes out the pizza from an oven - I noped out. I don't want my driver to have to handle my pizza directly.

You might as well have a food truck night in your neighborhood and one of those food trucks just be a pizza truck. Maybe it's hard for me to understand the problem, coming from CT, a pizza place was found on most business corners - think the closest one was three blocks away. My Brother worked at one 2 miles away, I worked at one 6 miles away. There were many many pizza places in between (you were seen in the wrong one, someone in the family got mad LOL)

If I saw that video as an investor, I’d pull my money. It’s so telling. All the “robots” do is pour sauce, spread it and then eventually put it in the oven and take it out? They still hire a person for the toppings. That’s like something my local pizzeria already does. A guy stretches the dough and lays it on a conveyer belt. They then have machines that are hand operated for the sauce and have the oven right in the belt. The pizza comes piping hot on the other side and a stamping like tool is used to cut the slices.

Anytime a ceo for a company that wants to replace humans with robots claims that the thing the robots will do happens best when done with love, run.

Co-founder happy faced nice woman in the vid seemed pretty confident about how efficient everything was. Wonder how they drew up their numbers? Was really great to also hear her talk about what robots are good at, and what humans are good at - very insightful. I prefer operations and biz models that are less complex, this seems to have added lots of complexity? Seems super strange that you are automating the process except for when the toppings are added - that’s a human? Remember, it’s all love people, all love. (Vomit)

Imagine reading this first sentence 20 or 30 years ago:

"Zume Inc., a one-time robot pizza business that came to represent the excesses of pre-pandemic venture investing, has shut operations, two people familiar with the matter said."

Can't wait for the headlines 20 or 30 years in the future.

A container of Soylent Thincrust, lost earlier during hurricane Harlan, washed up on the shores of Orlando to the delight of the Orange County Non-Denominational Order of Homeless Laborers.

Moon Expedition Returns After 10-Week Mission to Recover Annual Cricket Harvest.

* Insert Neur-anal Link Now to Experience Full Story Details

20 years ago was dotcom bust. Swap pandemic for terrorists and it's about right.

Then it was things like free pet food delivery. Lose money on every order. Make up for it in volume. Was volume insanity.

The funny thing is that some of the most ridiculed dot com era busines models have current equivalents. For pets.com, there's Chewy. For kozmo.com, there's DoorDash. I guess time will tell if they're just spending VC money until bankruptcy, or if things have changed to make them viable.

I've heard the connection between the dotcom crash and terrorism once before, but never got it. The crash definitely happened before 9/11. What terrorists are connected with the dotcom crash?

The funny thing is, you show this to someone in 1998 and they’d probably get the impression that robotics took off some time between then and now, and that this was more a casualty of the ominously unspecified pandemic rather than largely due to robotics still not being viable for everyday applications.

https://archive.is/20230603023911/https://www.bloomberg.com/...

Three things:

(1) In a fully automatized economy, owning a link in the last mile of food delivery is valuable.

(2) You could make a USP out of "our robots are clean: best hyghienic condotions for your pizza." This works until some journalist finds leaked machine oil in your tomato cake.

(3) The wisdom of the ages speaks of being ten times better. The design goal for the iPhone was to be ten times better, than other smart phones of that era. Not just better. Ten times better. I fail to see how current pizza delivery can be improved ten times. Maybe it can. But it's pretty good already.

>The wisdom of the ages speaks of being ten times better.

This is an efficiency move. Cut the human out of the loop.

Looks like the failure is less about creating an assembly line and more about creating a mobile assembly line.

Not just cut the human out, but I must also assume having it truck based cuts out building rental/ownership costs also

Failure in the mobile assembly line is what the article mentions but is kind of irrelevant if you're still just selling pizzas to people. No one really cares about buying pizza from this unknown company so they have no product market fit. imo cutting minimum wage humans out of the loop will not yield a big enough profit weighed against the machine and vehicle maintenance costs combined with the skilled labor costs to deal with them.

So maybe ~10x cheaper? I wonder what is the cost of ingredients for a $20 pizza. $2 seems low.

Flour costs less than 50 cents, sauce maybe 25 cents, probably at least $1-2 for cheap wholesale cheese, plus toppings.

Hot pizza ovens aren't free to buy or operate. It's hotter than a normal kitchen oven, and energy isn't free.

It didn't truly cut most humans out of the loop. The one near my house still had 2 delivery drivers because the pizza vehicle was permanently parked down a side street. They were only saving the cost of the third, pizza cooking employee and the capital expenses of the robot truck probably outweighed that single minimum wage several times over.

Their MVP was simply missing any key differentiators from established competitors except for the terrible pricing.

> I fail to see how current pizza delivery can be improved ten times.

Before reading this thread's comments, I would have agreed. But I have to admit, ordering a pizza and then ten minutes later receiving it at my doorstep having been removed from the oven less than a minute ago seems like a 10x improvement to my current experience.

I'm with you. Zume would have had a better chance if they refunded $440 million of that investment money, then spent the last $10 million to buy a few trucks and hire human beings to make the pizzas.

I wonder what that would cost the customer for it to be profitable. I doubt I'd pay 2x what I currently do for pizza delivery even if it was as I described above.

Where I live Dominios can't find/afford drivers to deliver the pizza(one is in jail for Jan.6th).

I find the whole premise of Zune offensive to common business sense. The demand for pizza cannot be so great that it deserves this type of automation. This complex production path effort has no chance of payoff and contributes nothing to the product the customer wanted, a pizza.

The crazy thing is that pizza production is so simple and the only reason to make it complex pizza production is the business model not.

I assume they were starting with pizzas and planning to expand to other cuisine from there. The idea of having hot, freshly-cooked food delivered to your door is one that could be worth a ton of money. But this wasn’t the right path, apparently!

I’ve had this business idea for ages sans robots.

Put pizza ovens on trucks and plan it so the pizza finishes cooking as you pull up.

I still feel that could be viable. A cook in the back and driver in front.

These guys seemed to want to over engineer everything.

They were trying to build a technical moat that 2 guys and truck couldn't replicate. They didn't care what business was started as long as it had a moat and was scalable.

We had a tiny local “startup” selling freshly made but cold gourmet Roman pinsas that you would heat up in your own oven at home. They failed for personal reasons, but while it lasted it felt like the future of takeout pizza. You can google a bit of info (in Danish) about them by searching for Spiga1991.

Take-and-bake pizzas here in the States are not out of the ordinary. Papa Murphy's, etc.

Of course, there’s no weird idea meets big money failure that SoftBank fails to have its hands in..

Wrll yes. But then SoftBank has his fingers, sorry its Saudi oil money, is basically every single VC funded company that exists. That strategy basicaly guarantees to be part of failure.

But even then Softbank seems to over perform in the failed investment part...

Wonder if they were too focused on solving the wrong problem. Reminds me of this article (featuring an innovative pizza box design from Zume)

Maybe if they just built pizza boxes instead of a delivery service they could have been successful.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/01/pizza...

They had already pivoted aimlessly after their first pizza robot business failed a few years ago; they've been on their last legs for a long time.

They had a fundamental problem: The pizza tasted bad.

Did robotics put constraints on available ingredients?

Spent all the money on hardware. Had to skimp on sauce and cheese.

> technical challenges, such as keeping melting cheese from sliding off while the pizzas baked in moving trucks.

Wouldn't the answer just be to always keep the Gs of a turn under a certain value?

I'd have assumed that they would have tried to do all of this manually before automating it, so wouldn't that issue be apparent before even designing a robot?

A good neapolitan pizza can cook in only a couple of minutes, so they could have also just done the cooking step at the destination. Or maybe less sauce, or less cheese.

Yeah, it should take 90 seconds for a neapolitan pizza to cook, so they definitely could cook them at the destination.

>or less cheese.

I'm not convinced that a pizza company whose strategy includes 'less cheese' is destined for success :-)

Yeah that line doesn't lend itself well to marketing campaigns.

> Yeah, it should take 90 seconds for a neapolitan pizza to cook~

That doesn't sound like a lot... <googles>

"... baked for 60–90 seconds in a 485°C wood-fired oven"

Jesus. Okay then.

Yeah, you can't do that in a conventional kitchen oven, but you can buy home kit, gas or wood fired, or even electric, that can hit the target of going over 450C / 850 F.

e.g. models here https://ooni.com/ or here https://www.gozney.com/pages/home-pizza-ovens

The thinner the pizza, the faster it cooks!

Suspend them like a pendulum ?

That wouldn't be silicon valley enough. A basculating oven that swing to align the assembly line to the sum of gravity and inertia vector is the way. Need 6dof to cover changes in speed as well as cornering.

I don't understand the "robotic" aspect of this. Were robots used only in the factory preparing the pizzas, or there were a robot in the van itself? From what I see in the videos the robots were only in the factory and the pizzas in the van were taken out from the oven by the human driver. If that's the case, what makes this startup "robotic"? Any factory have robots.

Am I missing something?

$100,000 automotive assembly line style robots to move a pizza 30” from oven to conveyor. What a joke

I'd like to invest 400 million dollars

Sounds like if they could have held out for another year, AI would have fixed this.

They should have pivoted to blockchain

I don’t get it. When I order a pizza, I care about its taste, hygiene, and the time it takes to arrive. Why would I even care whether it was cooked by humans or robots?

The pizzas are pre-assembled by a 6dof arm at a production facility, this is their value add as being equivalent of replacing the manual labor to finish a pizza similar to what Costco food court's been doing.

The pizzas are then par-baked in a van with built in ovens, then when given the order ticket the ovens then switch to baking mode after determining routing information.

The vision is that all these work smoothly and in tangent to give you the best tasting, cleanest, hottest pizza upon arrival.

The robot stuff is to hype them up to be futuristic and worthy of half a billion dollars instead of bunch of biz, tech, and ops folks hanging around a big empty warehouse in Sunnyvale configuring and reconfiguring lines, with a motor pool full of food trucks installed with heavy ass ovens with no where to go and a iPhone app using Onfleet API.

The "in trucks" part of "robots in trucks" does seem to be the more important bit. That your pizza is arriving at your home, fresh from the oven. Perhaps the robot part is needed because 2 people in a truck is too expensive.

I’m not from the US, but would the initial capex and the ongoing maintenance expenses for the robots really be cheaper than a couple of minimum wage workers. IMO, a better approach would be to start with “people in trucks”, and gradually introduce robots as they scale. Something like Uber’s vision of offering cheaper rides using self driving cars (but more realistic).

Yes, though cynically, I think the idea is that venture capitalists only open their wallets if they can see your robot in action. Prudent iteration doesn't attract money.

I think they were trying to use the technology to get the pizzas to their customers faster and cheaper than a typical pizza place. I actually ordered from them a bunch a few years ago before they shut down, they were pretty good - good food, good prices, fast delivery. I guess it just wasn't sustainable though, which is unfortunate.

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