The food made at Zume Pizza, a new pizzeria in Mountain View, CA is made mostly by robots. The company's next plan is to build special food trucks where the pizza finishes cooking on its way to you.
"We are going to be the Amazon of food," Zume's co-founder and executive chairman, Alex Garden, tells Bloomberg. Formerly of Zynga and and Microsoft Xbox Live, Garden's brought on restaurant industry specialists to get all the details right, but Zume is all about the robots.
When making pizzas, an employee spreads the dough. Then the robots take over. A robot named "Marta" "spreads [the sauce over the pizza] perfectly, but not too perfectly, so it looks like an artisan product," Garden says. Humans then add the cheese and sauce, and then another robot Zume calls "Bruno" moves the pizza from the conveyor belt into the oven. If Garden has his way, they'll then fully cook in the delivery truck on the way to the customer, with barely a single human hand touching them.
That's pending the Santa Clara County Health Department's review, of course. Garden is quick to note that "nobody has ever done this" before, and health departments around the country generally have strict rules on not allowing food trucks to cook while driving. Garden argues that he's in a bit of a different scenario since his food isn't actually being touched by human hands; it's cooking in one of the fifty-six ovens he's got in his tricked out delivery truck. For now, pizzas are being delivered the old fashioned way.
Those pizza delivery drivers shouldn't get too comfortable, though. "Just imagine Domino's without the labor component," says Garden. "You can start to see how incredibly profitable that can be." Domino's has been experimenting with pizza robots of their own, in the form of an Australian delivery bot they call Dru.
Zume's got mostly positive reviews on Yelp, although the negative reviews are so shocked at the good ones that they're suspicious of bribery. There's only one way to find out the truth.
Source: Bloomberg
David Grossman is a staff writer for PopularMechanics.com. He's previously written for The Verge, Rolling Stone, The New Republic and several other publications. He's based out of Brooklyn.
