Hacker News Reader

Comment by Torwald | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

> 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’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.

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!

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.

>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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com