But step 1 is exactly the problem. I assume whatever production line makes my frozen pizzas looks pretty much like Zume's robotic pizza assembly line - except for the part where those are frozen and can be shipped from a single factory to a whole country.
Zume reinvents the whole process, but instead of freezing it they put it in a delivery truck and heat it up on the last mile. Which means the factory has to be close to your delivery area. Now, factoring in competition from all other pizza delivery services, how much scale can you achieve with that? How long until automation of these small-scale runs pays off? And how many sufficiently big cities are there to expand to?
"Having a working product" is often "too late to invest" in startups. It's just part of the culture. If you want to invest in somewhere that actually makes pizzas, you can buy an Italian restaurant in any city in the country.
A half a billion dollars...for a pizza place, robots or not. I should have some profound comment to make here, but this has reached a scale where my meager human mind cannot keep up, similar to a journey to Pluto or summat. It's almost as if SoftBank is just here for our entertainment, and the end game is...hell if I know, but I am entertained.
Dominos is one of the 10 biggest restaurant chains on the planet and their market cap is only $10.6b. Anyone who thought to value this startup at over 20% of that does seem comically and entertainingly incompetent.
To make it even funnier, just remind yourself that Softbank raised all this money to accelerate the development of the singularity, which will happen just 15 years from now (according to softbank). Just imagine the chain of thinking that links that to pizza.
As cool as the concept looked I wasn't sure how viable it would be to try to mass deliver all those pizzas. I imagine the bottle neck is # of delivery drivers during peak hours...and you simply would want more drivers, not 1 person delivering 50 pizzas. I guess I found my answer.
Dominos did partner with General Motors for a fleet of Bolt EVs for their delivery vehicles. It would be cool if Dominos built into the hatchback warmer ovens. Now that would be a more viable business model than a UPS truck size driving around.
Absolutely not. The idea sounded good in the founders' heads, and now a tech blog is here to interview you, so you better "believe" what you are selling.
So they still have humans loading up the dough flattener, applying cheese and toppings, taking the pizza out of the oven, putting it in the automatic cutter, and then handling the pizza until it gets to your door? Other than the dough flattener, I don't really see this as a major improvement. Applying sauce takes about two seconds and can be done by the toppings guy. Automatic cutters already exist but are a little faster and more consistent than a human. Getting a dried out pizza that has been driven all over town doesn't seem that appetizing either. I worked in a Sbarro's location in college and we did the same thing with pizzas before the lunch/dinner rush and it just dried them out. Being in a box doesn't help much either but I'd rather have more direct deliveries than my food sitting in a warmer for who knows how long. Paying half a billion for a sauce machine, robot arm for loading the oven, and what is essentially a food truck with a big oven has got to be the biggest waste of money. This has to be some form of money laundering.
If this really was such an obvious innovation, why haven't any of the big chains done the same? The fast food industry is always trying new ideas to help speed up food and make it more consistent so I don't see them missing the idea of something like using a robot arm.
A pizza food truck is probably one of the best ways to enjoy a pizza, outside of an actual restaurant, if you want fresh without the degradation during the trip.
Seems like reasonable solution. And even there I hate the dough prep step... But I think in one other video that was automated. So I suppose you could throw in boxing robot at the end and get pretty decent full solution already.
One thing's for sure: this is a much worse business case at 5% interest than at 0% interest.
Borrowing money at 5% for an expensive machine that can be replaced by paying monthly salaries for labor is not a great business proposition. But it may be at 0% interest.
The linked Bloomberg article[0] had this info I found quite funny:
> Last June, Zume bought a company called Pivot Packaging to jump-start its ability to sell compostable containers to other businesses. It held a one-day test at a Pizza Hut in Phoenix in October, with the goal of expanding the tests to more locations in January or February of this year. But the boxes can’t legally hold food in some jurisdictions, including San Francisco, because they contain the chemicals known as PFAS
So.. compostable forever chemicals, how does that work?
On their own they are compostable, but after usage they are drenched in oil and other stuff, which makes it impossible to recycle them, and harder to compost in a regular unprepared setting. So maybe their aim was to make them compostable for any private customer or unprepared garbage companies?
You can generally compost food-soiled paper products, though I expect the cardboard used in pizza boxes wouldn't break down easily in a home or vermiculture composter. Commercial or municipal compost service providers should be able to handle a pizza box just fine. E.g., the Seattle municipal compost program lists pizza boxes as one of the top 5 things you should be putting in your compost bin: https://www.seattle.gov/utilities/your-services/collection-a...
oh, come on, a bit of oil is perfectly fine in the garbage/compost, a few moments ago (figuratively speaking) it was still a sunflower-seed or an olive, both of which are fine to throw into the compost and degrade fine on their own if they fall onto the groud.
Reasonably fine for large scale/municipal composting. Last time I checked there was a lack of strong consensus on whether animal fat always composts well in someone's backyard composter, so YMMV. But the reply was really poking fun at the idea that pizza fat (outside of strict vegan pizza I guess) is exclusively plant based.
It is no longer the case that pizza boxes are not recyclable. Paper Mills all over the country have no problem recycling them even with grease and cheese on them. Some localities haven't updated their guidelines so please check yours and let people know.
I have just Googled "PFAS compostable" and unfortunately it does not seem uncommon... For instance [1] (from the UK):
"Surprisingly, the highest levels of PFAS (by an order of magnitude!) were consistently reported in moulded fibre compostable, ‘eco-friendly’ takeaway containers; the type we’re told are sustainable alternatives to plastic."
Also, I thought pizza boxes were just cardboard, especially since they are single use and for a short time, only.
Hmm, I'm not certain, but it seems that fluorine applied to plastic coatings can make them better against oxygen and moisture and probably oils. This process then forms PFAS.
PFAS is used in the inside coating on "compostable" cardboard takeout boxes. Its also used in those compostable paper straws. The coating is to prevent moisture from damaging the container. I have no idea why someone would put it in pizza boxes.
I honestly think we should rethink some of these compostable things, PLA would work better for straws and packaging for cold food and beverages, and there have been wax coated cardboard containers for both hot and cold food for a while.
Investors must be pretty cheesed off that they couldn't deliver. Everyone wanted a slice of the low-rate environment pie, but now it's cooled down and doesn't taste so good anymore. But maybe some hungry folks will buy the dip. Pepperoni.
A couple years ago, I was interviewing for my first job at a startup. The company was very small at the time (~75 employees), and my interview loop included the CEO.
When he gave me a chance to ask him questions, I asked if he watched the show Silicon Valley, and asked how real the show is.
He laughed, and said yes, he loved the show, and that it's surprisingly realistic. There are things that they exaggerate for comedic effect, obviously, but generally the show isn't too far off from reality.
I've been a small time investor for decades and would usually be the one to handle hard tech issues at the start-ups I invested in if they ran into some kind of wall (scaling, hard to find bugs). Someone (another investor) noticed that and tipped off a friend who worked for a really large fund, they hired me to do a DD job on a company in Germany and that got me my launching customer. Syndicated deals grow the network and bit by bit it became a pretty serious player. Now doing anywhere from 20 to 45 jobs per year depending on the economy.
VC start-ups where never about the start-up or the product. They are designed to shut down after few years of rising capital to pay the execs ridiculous amount of money. Is about funnelling those funds to salary and bonuses before it runs dry. Rinse and repeat.
If Blaze Pizza couldn’t beat Dominos in flavor and texture when I’m right there picking all the ingredients and eating the pizza fresh out the oven, then Zume had no chance.
The fundamental issue is that these pizzas are made expediently. There are compromises made in pursuit of automation and speed that make the pizza worse than Dominos/Pizza Hut/Papa John’s. Those aren’t paragons of pizza-making by any stretch, but they’re the competition.
Theoretically you can create a machine that puts out a pizza that rivals the best pies in Brooklyn or New Haven, every single time, but I guess investors thought that the plebs will eat fancy DiGiorno’s at Domino’s prices and not notice the difference.
Maybe one of the major pizza chains will buy Zume’s IP and iterate from there. I don’t think they’d deploy the technology until it reaches human-equivalence for at least some of their pizzas or part of the pizza-making process. Pizza chains can play the long game. A pizza robot startup valued at $500M can’t.
I think it’s really unlikely that anyone will buy the IP because Zume wasn’t a serious robotics company, it was a vibe/feeling/vapourware thing. My understanding is they never reached the point where they could automatically place most toppings. They were becoming less robotic as they attempted to expand.
Interesting that topping placement was their barrier to full automation. You’d think dropping stuff on a bounded circle is a solved problem for robots.
65 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 131 ms ] threadZume reinvents the whole process, but instead of freezing it they put it in a delivery truck and heat it up on the last mile. Which means the factory has to be close to your delivery area. Now, factoring in competition from all other pizza delivery services, how much scale can you achieve with that? How long until automation of these small-scale runs pays off? And how many sufficiently big cities are there to expand to?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2022/12/05/early-vent... : in some sense, the real product, the hugely profitable one, was "the idea of a pizza company".
Or, if we look closer, the idea of a packaging company. They did indeed raise over $400m actual cash. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/zume-inc/company_fin...
As cool as the concept looked I wasn't sure how viable it would be to try to mass deliver all those pizzas. I imagine the bottle neck is # of delivery drivers during peak hours...and you simply would want more drivers, not 1 person delivering 50 pizzas. I guess I found my answer.
Dominos did partner with General Motors for a fleet of Bolt EVs for their delivery vehicles. It would be cool if Dominos built into the hatchback warmer ovens. Now that would be a more viable business model than a UPS truck size driving around.
If this really was such an obvious innovation, why haven't any of the big chains done the same? The fast food industry is always trying new ideas to help speed up food and make it more consistent so I don't see them missing the idea of something like using a robot arm.
A pizza food truck is probably one of the best ways to enjoy a pizza, outside of an actual restaurant, if you want fresh without the degradation during the trip.
Seems like reasonable solution. And even there I hate the dough prep step... But I think in one other video that was automated. So I suppose you could throw in boxing robot at the end and get pretty decent full solution already.
Borrowing money at 5% for an expensive machine that can be replaced by paying monthly salaries for labor is not a great business proposition. But it may be at 0% interest.
Mayasoshi San may be history's first de-industrialist.
> [...] lay off over half its employees and attempt a very hard pivot from robotic pizza delivery to sustainable packaging.
Evaluations apparently mean nothing anymore?
> Last June, Zume bought a company called Pivot Packaging to jump-start its ability to sell compostable containers to other businesses. It held a one-day test at a Pizza Hut in Phoenix in October, with the goal of expanding the tests to more locations in January or February of this year. But the boxes can’t legally hold food in some jurisdictions, including San Francisco, because they contain the chemicals known as PFAS
So.. compostable forever chemicals, how does that work?
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-13/inside-th...
https://www.afandpa.org/news/2021/lets-set-record-straight-p... https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/yes-you-can-recycle-your-p...
"Surprisingly, the highest levels of PFAS (by an order of magnitude!) were consistently reported in moulded fibre compostable, ‘eco-friendly’ takeaway containers; the type we’re told are sustainable alternatives to plastic."
Also, I thought pizza boxes were just cardboard, especially since they are single use and for a short time, only.
[1] https://www.fidra.org.uk/chemicals-pollution/pfas-in-compost...
However it doesn't go into _why_ there are PFAS in 'compostable' materials. At a wild guess, they are too fragile without them?
I honestly think we should rethink some of these compostable things, PLA would work better for straws and packaging for cold food and beverages, and there have been wax coated cardboard containers for both hot and cold food for a while.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYu-d6y5HRo
When he gave me a chance to ask him questions, I asked if he watched the show Silicon Valley, and asked how real the show is.
He laughed, and said yes, he loved the show, and that it's surprisingly realistic. There are things that they exaggerate for comedic effect, obviously, but generally the show isn't too far off from reality.
"Instead of giving them $445M, give me $44M and then don't do the pizza thing. You'll save $400M. You can't afford not to give me this money."
The fundamental issue is that these pizzas are made expediently. There are compromises made in pursuit of automation and speed that make the pizza worse than Dominos/Pizza Hut/Papa John’s. Those aren’t paragons of pizza-making by any stretch, but they’re the competition.
Theoretically you can create a machine that puts out a pizza that rivals the best pies in Brooklyn or New Haven, every single time, but I guess investors thought that the plebs will eat fancy DiGiorno’s at Domino’s prices and not notice the difference.
Maybe one of the major pizza chains will buy Zume’s IP and iterate from there. I don’t think they’d deploy the technology until it reaches human-equivalence for at least some of their pizzas or part of the pizza-making process. Pizza chains can play the long game. A pizza robot startup valued at $500M can’t.