Zume wants to disrupt the pizza industry with robots

Zume is a secretive tech startup in California that wants to become the Amazon of Food. Zume wants to come up with a more efficient and cost-effective method to make Pizzas, one where humans are replaced with robots. The robots for the startup were made through a collaboration with Swiss automation conglomerate, ABB. There are two robots working with humans at Zume’s kitchens. Marta spreads sauce on the pizzas, and Bruno loads them into an oven. The pizzas pass through an assembly line where humans and machines rapidly add the required toppings and prepare the Pizza for the oven. The robots have algorithms programmed in that make the food preparation slightly imperfect so that the pizzas do not look like they have come from an assembly line. The imperfections qualifies the pizzas as artisanal. https://twitter.com/zumepizza/status/747517339302649856 Another technological innovation is planned, but needs permission from the authorities before it can be implemented. The idea is to use cloud, remote controlled ovens, delivery trucks and estimation of time taken to reach a location to deliver hot-from-the-oven pizzas at any location. There are 56 ovens that can be individually controlled remotely in each truck. Each of the ovens will be loaded with menu items by robots. Three minutes and fifteen seconds before the truck reaches a delivery destination, the oven turns on remotely. The customer gets the freshest possible pizza in this way, reports Bloomberg. The co-founder and executive chairman of Zume is Alex Garden, who was the former president of Zynga. Google and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) are interested in funding Zume. KPCB has a stellar portfolio of investments in silicon valley startups including Twitter, Amazon and Google itself.