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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."
A former employee of Microsoft, makers of the Zune, names his company "Zume"? Don't strain your creativity muscle there, pal.
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It says right there that humans add the cheese and other toppings. How is that "without a labor component"?
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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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No that's the only range you can do in home ovens,
pizza ovens are MUCH hotter than residential ones are capable of
hell yes, roving pizza bots!
The future IS HERE! Fuck everyone talking about skynet, I'm talking about ROVING PIZZA BOTS.
I believe roving pizza bots are a sign that the singularity is near.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
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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Robots aren't free and they need health care (skilled maintenance) and sick days too (repair for breakdown)
Non sequitur: Your facts are uncoordinated.
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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I'm not entirely disagreeing with you but it also depends on how wet the dough is. When I worked at a pizza shop, the stone bottom oven was set to 725f. We started cooking on a pan and removed the pan about 2/3 through the process. The pies only stayed in the oven about 4-5 minutes. A minute or two longer when busy due to temps dropping from the doors opening so much. We ran 2 double deck ovens (4 doors and bottoms) during peak and turned the bottom set down to 300f after the rush so it could be cranked up easily if it got busy again. They took about 4 hours to heat up after being off all night but retained most of the heat when down so it could be brought back up to temp in about 45 minutes or so if needed again.
Commercial Brick/Ceramic pizza ovens typically operate between 800-900F this is the oldest kind and doesn't have an un-loader bot or whatever you think it requires. These are large and the most expensive and desirable kind of pizza oven all of the others attempt to simulate the pizza this style produces using newer tech
Commercial Deck pizza ovens operate between 450-750F these are the ones most pizza places uses, its a big metal thing with a slot some have a conveyor but its not common
Commercial CONVECTION pizza ovens operate at about 400-500F these are the newest kind that exist and no one likes them they're found in places crammed for space and unwilling to pay for one of the previous 2
only the 3rd kind is used for deep dish or pan pizzas the previous 2 are for your standard hand tossed or thin crust style pizza
source. I've worked in restaurant supply for 32 years and i'm sure a bit of googling can confirm these numbers to be generally correct
"Just imagine Domino's..."
I'm not a big pizza snob, but even I think you're setting a pretty low bar there.
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Eh, pizza ovens usually get set around 550 degrees.
That depends on the style of pizza. If you're baking traditional Neapolitan style pizza (i.e., the kind they make in Naples, Italy, the place where pizza is kinda from), the official regulations say you need a minimum cooking surface temperature of about 900F, and a minimum oven dome temperature of about 800F. Cooking time should be no longer than 90 seconds.
Even at 500 degrees you have to put the pizza on a screen or it will burn on contact with the oven.
I bake pizza all the time at home at the maximum my oven will do (550F). A little while back, I actually invested in a thick steel plate to get more heat into my pizza dough faster, compared to a traditional baking stone (which really can't make great pizza at only 550F in a home oven).
Somehow I bake pizzas all the time pumping the heat in as fast as my oven can at over 500F, and my pizzas don't burn.
Again, it depends on the type of dough. Neapolitan dough is intended for 800-900F ovens, traditional "New York style" dough is often baked lower, usually somewhere in the 500-600F range or a bit higher. Chicago deep dish is baked even lower than that.
Amazon. Duh. https://fresh.amazon.com/