This article was 1st published on our sister Site, Digital World Native.
This development is a classic example of a mashup between the real & digital worlds. And since tech & pizzas have this mysterious link, we are featuring this development here.
Like any other Silicon Valley startup worth its salt this US-based Zume Pizza wants to disrupt an industry: by having its robots make & serve your pizza. Most of its pizza business is automated, from the smartphone app for ordering, the sauce dispenser/spreading robots, the robot arms that puts trays in the oven & even the new multi-tray ovens in the delivery trucks that automatically heat up your pie just in time to deliver your meal at an optimum temperature & texture.
Some of the steps needed to totally automate this assembly line pizza-making process are still done by humans, but Zume means to take human workers out of the loop as much as possible, especially when it comes to boring repetitive tasks. Its co-founder & CEO Julia Collins, a restaurant industry pro, claims that the money they save on labor will mean they can use higher quality ingredients & that their model will include humans, who will always work together with the machines to “create delicious food”.
According to another one of its co-founders, former Microsoft Xbox Live General Manager Alex Garden, they wanted to be “the Amazon of food” & that by using robots they weree “going to free up people to do things that are higher value”. The service began earlier this year in “stealth” mode from a garage in Mountain View, in the heart of Silicon Valley. Zume then started working with Swiss robot maker, ABB, & secretly recruited engineers to build out the company.
Currently, Zume is gearing up to deliver pizza in its patented delivery trucks, each containing 56 ovens, which can be controlled remotely. According to co-founder Garden:
The robots will load all these individual ovens with different menu items. Then the truck will circle the neighborhood. At precisely 3 minutes and 15 seconds before arriving at the customer’s location, the cloud commands the oven to turn on &, BOOM, the customer gets a fresh, out-the-oven pizza delivered to their door.
Established restaurant industry companies as well as other startups are also working, & have been for years, on building machinery & robots to reduce labor costs, increase productivity & to improve safety, but few have been as single-mindedly devoted to the task as Zume.
If you live in or near Mountain View, California (USA) you can order Zume Pizza by installing the iOS app from the Apple App Store here or the Android App from Google Play here.
Image Credit: Zume Pizza
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