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Robot Pizza Company 'Zume' Wants To Be 'Amazon of Food' (bloomberg.com)
kheldan writes: Do you want robots making your pizza? Alex Garden, co-founder and executive chairman of Mountain View startup Zume, is betting you will. Garden, the former president of Zynga Studios, was previously a general manager of Microsoft's Xbox Live. Garden launched Zume in stealth mode last June, when he began quietly recruiting engineers under a pseudonym and building his patented trucks in an unmarked Mountain View garage. In September, he brought on Julia Collins, a 37-year-old restaurant veteran. She became chief executive officer and a co-founder. Collins was previously the vice president and CEO of Harlem Jazz Enterprises, the holding company for Minton's, a historic Harlem eatery. The company consists of an army of robot sauce-spreaders and trucks packed full of ovens. "In the back of Mountain View's newest pizzeria, Marta works tirelessly, spreading marinara sauce on uncooked pies. She doesn't complain, takes no breaks, and has never needed a sick day. She works for free." The pie then "travels on a conveyer belt to human employees who add cheese and toppings." From there, "The decorated pies are then scooped off the belt by a 5-foot tall grey automation, Bruno, who places each in a 850-degree oven. For now, the pizzas are fully cooked and delivered to customers in branded Fiats painted with slogans, including: 'You want a piece of this?' and 'Not part of the sharing economy.'" Garden says, "We are going to be the Amazon of food. [...] Just imagine Domino's without the labor component. You can start to see how incredibly profitable that can be."
I submitted this story specifically so I could say that: I don't want robots making my pizza, I want a skilled human being making my pizza, not for what a pizza costs. Otherwise I'd just settle for a shitty frozen pizza and throw it in the oven at home for a fraction of the price. At the very least there has to be a competent human being supervising the automated process for quality control purposes, but even then some pizza made on an assembly line by a bunch of robots just doesn't sound appetizing. If this is what the world ends up going to, then I guess I'll be staying home and making my own meals 100% of the time. I suspect I won't be alone in that, either.
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There are plenty of factories that make pizza's using robots, there is nothing new about that and there are a handful of companies that will sell you a custom 'robot' (or as they used to call it, a conveyor belt). Given the amount of time and money spent (employee cost, prototyping etc) reinventing the wheel, I'm not sure whether it would be a good investment to go into business with such morons.
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Nah, I just want bold, ital, etc. No, definitely no GIFs.
They'll also need to remember to update their CSS so ULs and OLs work at all.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
are popular fast food because there's very little actual skill involved in making it. It's bread and cheese and toppings. If your a restaurateur then you want to make food that doesn't need expensive labor so you can maximize profit and have employees that don't need a lot of training. Well trained employees have to be coddled because they've got options.
This makes the pizza and hamburger biz ripe for automation. I like what some blokes in Europe suggesting: Tax robots and spread the wealth. I don't know what else we'll do besides have a massive underclass of people without food security and absolutely nothing to lose. The cool thing is when this happens you get a high crime rate and then the ruling class gets to move hard right to crack down on all that crime, creating a self perpetuating system. I'm seeing this in Brazil, Venezuela and the Philippians and I figure the whole world is gonna go this route or else Scandinavian style socialism. I'm hoping for the latter but not betting on it.
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But in this case, the roses are covered in bullshit.
"She works for free."
No, "she" doesn't. Anyone who says a piece of equipment "works for free" even if it doesn't have an operator most of the time is /lying/. Maintenance and setup costs can be a bitch. If you believe that machines are "free labor," you have no experience in manufacturing. They amplify the ability to make stuff (scaling up is more economical), but they're not free.
The pie then "travels on a conveyor belt to human employees who add cheese and toppings.
So the only problem solved here was the simplest, spreading sauce. Frozen pizza companies have solved the issue of automation, but it doesn't scale down. I'll get to that in the last paragraphs.
Even the guy who tried making a burger-making-robot failed. It was basically a VC scam, which this sounds like.
>Zynga
Yeah... uh...
>end of article
>shells out for a hand-made pizza, because it's better.
But of course, because bespoke pizzas are easier to make when the maker can /adapt/, unlike a machine, which must be retooled. Frozen pizzas, made entirely under automation, are "standardized" per the manufacturer. And that's what happens when you automate something that's hand-made, choices get reduced to a handful. You're not going to see a pizza come from these trucks with soppressata, as 80 percent (or more) of people /don't even know what it is/.
I'm not saying this is impossible, but the fact is that a lot of people go to pizzerias because they can easily get special orders, because if you can't, frozen pizzas are less expensive and you don't have to leave home. Say what you will about cardboard and disappointment, but big pizza chains that rely on human help will still do special orders.
"Any color, as long as it's black." - H. Ford
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BMO