9 ms·

Zume, a new startup trying to make a more profitable pizza through robotics

74 points by mathattack 10y ago

deleted 10y ago
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batbomb 10y ago
Not sure what this does that Costco doesn't already do
mmanfrin 10y ago
Puff piece -- the idea of cooking pizzas in a truck is a good one, but the whole 'robotics' angle is a little trite. The only automated part seemed to be the sauce (which Costco does) and moving the pizza to the oven. I like the moving-pizza-truck idea, it's a shame this had to go the route of 'robotic pizzeria' since it's so blatantly a puff piece.
- bizzleDawg 10y ago
  The idea of cooking on the road is great, but those wire conveyer racks that they're cooking on look like a nightmare to clean. I suspect cleaning all of those ovens will not be automatable for now either. on a different note, mini pizza ovens seem to be the best part of this startup, seems as though it could be a great product when combined with 'artisinal robot made' frozen pizza.
  - Fricken 10y ago
    It seems unnessecarily complex having 56 separate ovens. Why not just one oven, that the driver loads up between deliveries? Am I missing something?
    - daxelrod 10y ago
      It looks like the individual ovens allow them to cook each pizza for a precise amount of time: At precisely 3 minutes and 15 seconds before arriving at the customer's location, the cloud commands the oven to turn on and--" Garden made the symbol of a large explosion emanating from his brain-- "BOOM, the customer gets a fresh, out-the-oven pizza delivered to their door." I'm guessing this was less complex than trying to move pizzas in and out of a larger oven in a moving vehicle.
      - ams6110 10y ago
        Baking pizza in a moving vehicle doesn't seem feasible to me. The sauce, cheese, etc. in a 600 degree oven are like soup. Turn the corner or need to make any kind of a rapid stop and it will all slosh to one side and ruin the pie.
        daxelrod 10y ago
        They do some prebaking of the pies before they enter the truck, so I'm wondering if the truck ovens don't get that hot.
- ma2rten 10y ago
  I think they said they are planning to automate the other parts as well.
- TheMagicHorsey 10y ago
  You beat me to it. I agree. I think this article is actually more interesting because it shows you something about how a good tech PR strategy works. Bloomberg undoubtedly saw, on-site, how ridiculous the robotics narrative was, but they went with it anyways, because it makes for a more viral story. This kind of PR is a collaborative effort and win-win. If you have a tech startup you should really think about the narrative before you call in press. Think about what the audience wants from a story, and sell that. The goal of PR is to get your company noticed ... so long as you don't turn off genuine customers, you can actually go pretty far away from reality before the average user picks up on the fact that the story is mostly bullshit. I think they should have kept the CEO out of this video. He comes across as a bit too much of a shuckster. A CTO type would have been a better type. Also, instead of positioning the business as increased profit, he should have presented the reduction in labor costs as savings for the customer. That always makes a better story. The CEO's brain probably doesn't work that way, but the PR firm he hired should have given him that tip.
  - colinplamondon 10y ago
    This is national media, for a local business - the audience of this is 100% investors, for the round they mention raising.
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  Plus they keep forgetting that people are cheaper robots. A VC our family knows designed in 90's SmartMart: a convenience store that was totally automated. You order at fuel-pump looking Kiosks, robots pull it from stock, and machine delivers it to your car as you pay. To think grocers brag about mere self-checkouts. Unfortunately, the SmartMarts cost around $10 mil versus about $1 mil for stores underpaying & overworking humans. It folded.
  - anonbanker 10y ago
    Anecdotal evidence from 20+ years ago seems like the common argument against Virtual Reality, as well. Technology got better, and cheaper. That puts previously-unattainable goals within reach. Would you argue that a $15/hour McDonald's employee will be cost-competitive with a Big Mac machine nowadays?
    - nickpsecurity 10y ago
      Depends on cost of a machine. Plus, McDonalds is a weak even if common example. Many companies push employees go focus on good service or at least sales (esp upselling). Computers still arent as good at that with a good chunk of customers rejecting them outright in such uses. Far as machines, depends on how cost of installation, maintenance, and licensing vs humans it replaces. Varies case by case.
      - anonbanker 10y ago
        McDonald's was used as an example due to their work at automating their franchises, and their comments about increasing this to full automation due to the $15 minimum wage[0]. The bigger point (and the dirty secret of globalism) is that nobody can really afford labor, especially multinationals. 0. http://www.inquisitr.com/1594675/mcdonalds-counters-minimum-wage-hike-15-automation/ http://www.inquisitr.com/1594675/mcdonalds-counters-minimum-...
        nickpsecurity 10y ago
- Keats 10y ago
  Pizza trucks are very common in my hometown (south of France) so it's not really something new either.
jostmey 10y ago
Wow, they have a hose that sprays out pizza sauce and a way of putting a pizza in an oven. So how much are they saving in labor cost?
- jonknee 10y ago
  From the video it appears your stereotypical stoned college student working the late shift at Dominos could make pizzas at about 5-10x the rate of that robot assisted assembly line. Their "automated" method uses more people than a manual operation!
ojbyrne 10y ago
I tried this, as they had a coupon for a free pizza in Mountain View. The pizza was just ok, and considering the many choices around here for really good pizza, I probably won't actually pay for one of theirs unless I have some indication that the quality has improved.
- azinman2 10y ago
  That's what I care about. Interesting to hear it's only ok. There's another startup called pi (app is now called Pythagoras) that's also trying to reinvent much about pizza, and theirs is currently my fav pizza in SF (certainly for delivery). Plus it's delivered within 15 min from request!
  - sharemywin 10y ago
    as far as I can tell they arn't doing much from an automation side other than contracting with a kitchen and using an app with UberRush. Also, there charging $20 for a pizza with a very small deliveyr area.
    - azinman2 10y ago
      Don't know about automation (unimportant to me) but boxes are specially designed with a non-standard material, pizzas are premade and par-baked earlier in the day so that they can do last 3 min and then deliver to you (within 15 min), centralize the initial cooking then decentralize the last for faster delivery, have 15 min delivery at all, pizza dough has been researched with former head Google chef for what works best with their pre-cooking method, they only have 3 kinds of pizza in order to make all this work, and various other things along the chain. $20 delivery for this quality and size is pretty decent/normal in SF.
- mst 10y ago
  It seems another user has a plan for checking this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11982016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11982016
hiou 10y ago
That robotic arm is the salary of a dominos employee for 10+ years.
- bko 10y ago
  Source? > How Much Do New Robots Cost? Complete with controllers and teach pendants, new industrial robotics cost from $50,000 to $80,000. Once application-specific peripherals are added, the robot system costs anywhere from $100,000 to $150,000. Reconditioned robots are a less expensive option. Typically, used robots cost half as much as new robots. Used robot prices can range between an estimated $25,000 and $40,000, and systems with application components cost between $50,000 and $75,000. Just checked out a random pizza hut and seems to be open 11 AM - 10 PM daily or 11 hours a day or 77 hours a week or 4,000 hours a year. That'll cost about 30k a year at minimum wage not counting overtime, training, hiring cost, taxes, etc. [0] https://www.robots.com/faq/show/how-much-do-industrial-robots-cost https://www.robots.com/faq/show/how-much-do-industrial-robot...
  - ams6110 10y ago
    What you're leaving out is that the robot can only do one thing. The Dominos employee can do whatever is necessary including cleaning, restocking ingredients, handling customer/delivery issues, etc. Also if the robot breaks down or otherwise stops working properly it's costing you anywhere from $250-$1000/hr in lost business plus cost of emergency repairs (robot techs on call at 10pm are generally not making minimum wage).
- vessenes 10y ago
  Probably not, or at least it won't be at scale. Dominos employees need managers, benefits (of some sort), payroll, legal and HR.. liability insurance for when they get pissed off and do something nasty to another employee or a customer.. they cost a lot more than the hourly.
- ratsbane 10y ago
  There's nothing intrinsically expensive about a robot arm. It's few motors, sensors, metal, plastic, and something like a raspberry pi. With cheaper components and volume production a robot arm could cost less than a Domino's employee makes in a week.
Aelinsaar 10y ago
So basically, it's the tech for a high-volume operation, without the volume? Oh SF...
whyenot 10y ago
A consumer isn't going to care about the automation. Does the pizza taste good? I'm especially interested in how these "mobile ovens" will work out. If a delivery is 1 mile away vs 5 miles away, length of time in the oven will be different, yet you don't want to deliver under-baked dough or something that is burnt.
- rm999 10y ago
  The video in the article says they automatically turn the oven on when they're 3 minutes from the delivery (they have like 50 ovens in the truck). I think that's actually the coolest part of their idea.
  - ratsbane 10y ago
    I wonder how they power that. Propane?
  - jonknee 10y ago
    That many ovens seems ridiculous considering the pizzas need assembled and par baked before getting loaded into the truck. If I order my pie I have to wait until 50 other people get theirs, the driver returns to the store and loads up another 50 and then I get mine?
- deleted 10y ago
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aestetix 10y ago
So.... when all the people who were cooking the pizzas are out of work, who will be left to buy the pizzas? The same goes for all low wage jobs that are being automated away. I'm not sure how many people have really thought through the long term implications of what happens when you automate all the "grunt" work. As a successful business, your income comes from customers. Your customers need to make money somehow. All this automation seems like it will actually kill market liquidity. Edit: the obvious response is "a new market will move in. disrupting the old." However, I don't think the radio->television (and so on) analogy actually applies here, since it is demonstrable that there the new technologies replaced old technologies, rather than employees.
- mason55 10y ago
  That is why YC is investigating guaranteed basic income.
  - aestetix 10y ago
    The problem with basic income is it transfers the source of the paycheck from a company to the government. Right now, if I have an issue with my paycheck, I can go to the government for recourse. If my paycheck comes from the government, how do I achieve my check and balance? Also, it's already been established that Silicon Valley is not so happy with the government, so displacing an entire working class and making them dependent on the government would grant the government a power that seems against SV's interests.
    - nemonemo 10y ago
      Then you need to rely on the checks and balances between branches of the government. As you said, the checks and balances are ripe for disruption or at least improvement.
      - aestetix 10y ago
        We already do that to some extent. Keep in mind the class distinction between someone working for the government on their own volition (police officers, military, etc), versus someone using it as a resort-- welfare recipients, SSI, veterans, etc. The other thing to keep in mind, when you work for a company, at least in theory you hold a leverage of being able to quit and go to another job. If you're getting checks from the government (and possibly not working), you lose this leverage.
bko 10y ago
I think the upside of this method is not only the efficiency of reducing the human labor cost, but the consistency of eating something made by robots. Above all else, many Americans prefer consistency, which helps explain the popularity of many chain restaurants. Companies like Starbucks and McDonalds go to great efforts to ensure product control and proper training with minimal variability in the product quality. Also other exciting options include A/B testing which can provide a better feedback loop than manually tinkering and trying to tease out consumer preference.
ghaff 10y ago
> "Just imagine Domino's without the labor component," said Garden. "You can start to see how incredibly profitable that can be." So that quote leads me to imagine crappy pizza that's maybe a little cheaper than other crappy pizza. Doesn't exactly make me want to rush out and try it.
- noir_lord 10y ago
  It would be a little cheaper for you and massively more profitable to them (at least until everyone else adds robots).
  - petra 10y ago
    Idk. Pizza takes very little labor in making it, while the place, ingredients, logistics and marketing are quite complex.
- bko 10y ago
  It appears that millions of Americans prefer Dominos pizza considering they command 25% of the US pizza delivery market and sell 1.5 mm pies a day. Sorry their pizza isn't up to your standards. http://marketrealist.com/2015/03/dominos-pizza-serving-1-5-million-pies-day/ http://marketrealist.com/2015/03/dominos-pizza-serving-1-5-m...
  - kyledrake 10y ago
    Are they up to yours? I agree with the spirit of the poster. Nobody's going to lose sleep with anticipation for a cheaper McDonalds (that delivers!).
    - bko 10y ago
      I think Domino's pizza is great. I don't think you're the target market for McDonalds but they feed a lot of lower income Americans. If they can reduce costs and help those Americans save a little bit of money, it would be greatly beneficial.
some1else 10y ago
So, the industrial robot hand, nicknamed Bruno[1], withdraws the pizza from the conveyor belt and places it in the oven. 1: https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/i07.f8rTkb8w/v0/-999x-999.gif https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/i07.f8rTkb8...
exDM69 10y ago
Does anyone know how much automation is happening at a frozen pizza bakery/factory? The bakery industry has fairly elaborate robotics already, the ones in the video don't seem that revolutionary to me compared to an episode of "How it's made". I'd gladly eat robot pizza, though. Good luck to these guys.
tansey 10y ago
I guess I don't understand what is really novel about this. Don't brands like Digiorno and Freschetta already have highly-optimized pizza assembly lines? Is it really that hard to make the topping/sauce dispensing dynamic instead of static? I also don't understand the appeal of having the pizza be super hot-n-ready. If you have an efficient baking-to-delivery pipeline, and an insulated container for the pizza, then how much are you really improving the quality? Ten minutes of sitting still in an insulated bag is fine with me. And how do they handle the hand-off issue with an AUV? You get a notification and then the car sits there waiting to deliver the pizza for several minutes while you walk outside? At that point, the pizza is just as cold as it would have been if you had a human bring one to your door-- and at least the latter doesn't make you put on shoes. Just seems fraught with issues that really require what you might call "AUV-complete" or "robot-complete" tech. If you have a very smart, powerful drone that is capable of picking up a pizza, keeping it warm, and effectively delivering it to people's doors with 99.99% reliability, then this sounds obvious. Otherwise, this seems like an idea that's too soon to succeed.
- bpicolo 10y ago
  I agree. This doesn't look particularly innovative in that regard. Pizza sounds like a pretty easy food to assembly-line. I guess the difference is really fresh vs raw end goal?
- vessenes 10y ago
  So if you are a deep pizza nerd, the pitch that you'd have a neo-neapolitan style pizza at your door in short order is a great pitch. The issue with fulfilling this pitch is that pizzaiolos are expensive, hot ovens are hard to get close to people, etc. etc. Trying to solve all this is probably at one level a 'passion project' for a Valley engineer. A true 90 second Neapolitan pizza does not age that well, the crust is going to be soft under the tomato sauce, and it will get a bit nasty if it sits long. It's supposed to be oven to plate to mouth very quickly. On the other hand, could this be a business, not a passion project? Most restaurant gross margin is under 50%, declining the fancier the restaurant. That's before labor and other fixed costs, meaning restaurants are generally a pennies business. Pizza though, pizza has like 90% gross margin. If you could get rid of labor, you'd have a huge advantage economically against competitors.
nier 10y ago
Going into the article, I was very curious how they would handle the dough. It seems to me the video shows they are simply pressing it flat. So pizza nerds are not their intended market. http://recipes.howstuffworks.com/tools-and-techniques/tossing-a-pizza-101.htm http://recipes.howstuffworks.com/tools-and-techniques/tossin...
coherentpony 10y ago
I'm genuinely curious, what's the difference between robots replacing American jobs and foreigners replacing American jobs? Politicians go to great lengths to protect the sanctity of American jobs by passing strict immigration regulations and instantiating border checkpoints hundreds of miles inside the border. They don't seem to be mirroring their actions for robots.
- grondilu 10y ago
  > what's the difference between robots replacing American jobs and foreigners replacing American jobs? Complaining about the latter makes you sound xenophobic.
  - goldenkey 10y ago
    Its less about xenonorphism and more about lower standards and willingness to work for wages that require 5 people to share an apartment.
- ZoeZoeBee 10y ago
  Inevitability and lack of resources. We can all agree that robots are in the process of replacing many careers regardless of immigration. When the robot needs replacing you purchase a new robot. When the low skilled worker you imported is made obsolete by an even cheaper robot, now that worker must be taken care of by the state. Chances are that worker also plans on reproducing during their life, creating more unnecessary workers
- thaumasiotes 10y ago
  Foreigners bring their own culture along with them; robots can't do that. http://www.unz.com/gnxp/norway-offers-migrants-a-lesson-no-rapin/ http://www.unz.com/gnxp/norway-offers-migrants-a-lesson-no-r... > Migrants themselves can often be quite frank and astute observers of cross-cultural differences: > “Men have weaknesses and when they see someone smiling it is difficult to control,” Mr. Kelifa said, explaining that in his own country, Eritrea, “if someone wants a lady he can just take her and he will not be punished,” at least not by the police. Outsourcing would be a much closer parallel.
kneel 10y ago
>Alex Garden. Garden, 41, is the former president of Zynga Studios. Before that, he was a general manager of Microsoft's Xbox Live. Xbox? Zynga? This company will have us buying $10 pizza-points for pies that cost $7. Also you could sign up for credit cards to get coupons.
cgcardona 10y ago
In other words an assembly line? What about the machine learning algos which suggest pizzas based on previous purchases. What about the convolutional networks to recognize that each spray of sauce is truly unique and 'artisanal?' Where was the speech recognition for ordering and the oven encapsulating drone delivery swarm?
- deleted 10y ago
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xivzgrev 10y ago
He wants to take over pizza delivery industry but charges $18 for a pizza? Dominoes charges something like $10 for 2 mediums. The pizza delivery market is about acceptable quality, fast delivery, and low prices. Is he doing the elon musk strategy, where eventually he will undercut dominoes on price?
wyc 10y ago
Just looking at the delivery/cooking truck, I'm suddenly reminded of the opening chapter in Snow Crash: """ The analysts at CosaNostra Pizza University concluded that it was just human nature and you couldn't fix it, and so they went for a quick cheap technical fix: smart boxes. The pizza box is a plastic carapace now, corrugated for stiffness, a little LED readout glowing on the side, telling the Deliverator how many trade imbalanceproducing minutes have ticked away since the fateful phone call. There are chips and stuff in there. The pizzas rest, a short stack of them, in slots behind the Deliverator's head. Each pizza glides into a slot like a circuit board into a computer, clicks into place as the smart box interfaces with the onboard system of the Deliverator's car. The address of the caller has already been inferred from his phone number and poured into the smart box's builtin RAM. From there it is communicated to the car, which computes and projects the optimal route on a heads-up display, a glowing colored map traced out against the windshield so that the Deliverator does not even have to glance down. """ https://chnm.gmu.edu/courses/omalley/120f02/victory/snowcrash.html https://chnm.gmu.edu/courses/omalley/120f02/victory/snowcras...
hokkos 10y ago
Look like an inefficient frozen pizza factory like here https://youtu.be/ElQG6ZYR4zg https://youtu.be/ElQG6ZYR4zg
deveshparekh 10y ago
The kitchen opens today at noon. Instead of speculating about whether having an oven in the delivery truck makes a better pizza, I'll order a pizza today and then order the exact same pizza in August when they start using their oven truck and see if I notice any difference. If anybody else wants to try, you can use my referral code (https://zumepizza.com/#/r/593698 https://zumepizza.com/#/r/593698), which will give you a free pizza and give me a free pizza credit to fund the August portion of my experiment. I just hope nobody from Zume reads this and intentionally sabotages today's pizza.
simbalion 10y ago
Not to rain on the parade but terrible brand Dominos invented the robotic pizza kitchen, not these guys.
scottlocklin 10y ago
This is either going to end up dominating the food delivery business (unlikely, but possible) or present yet another case study in Silicon Valley delusions. It's entirely possible, easy even, to automate the pizza making process. You can go to the grocery store and purchase frozen pizzas which have never been touched by human hands. Exactly none of them are made by industrial robots. Industrial robots cost more than a pizza assembly line does, and they don't do anything that the line can't do. The only way this could make sense is if they could get them robots to make lots of other things, but, well "best of luck with that." At $18 for a pizza, they obviously aren't saving enough money on labor to pass this on to consumers.
- thaumasiotes 10y ago
  > You can go to the grocery store and purchase frozen pizzas which have never been touched by human hands. Exactly none of them are made by industrial robots. Industrial robots cost more than a pizza assembly line does, and they don't do anything that the line can't do. What's an industrial robot? Why is a fully-automated assembly line not considered robotic?
  - JoeAltmaier 10y ago
    I think it is - anything that measures and responds is 'robotic'. http://www.refrigeratedfrozenfood.com/articles/83570-pizza-processing-spotlight http://www.refrigeratedfrozenfood.com/articles/83570-pizza-p...
- oxide 10y ago
  I can get a cheap, shitty pizza for 8.50 out the door, with a max wait of 10 minutes at the local Lil Caesers. Thats a human made, human served pizza. How is this pie equivalent in price to the more premium pizza I can have across the street at Round Table, also served and made by humans? It doesn't add up.
- carterehsmith 10y ago
  Questions for people with some knowledge of engineering (I got none). It is about the 56-oven pizza truck: - How much power (or propane or whatever) do you need to run these ovens? - How much heat they emit in the truck, as a waste? Looks like some cooling is required. How much power for that. - What is the power source for the above items. Fuel, propane, batteries? - It kind of looks dangerous to have fuel or propane or batteries next to a bunch of running ovens? If so, where to put the fuel and where to put the engine. - Having flammable cardboard where the ovens are looks too dangerous. How do they get the pizza from the oven to the cardboard? I hope it's not the poor driver squeezing between a bunch of running ovens to get to the right one and get the pizza out?
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dsr_ 10y ago
They shouldn't want to be in the pizza business. They should want to be in the pizza-robot (-truck, etc.) business. Actually opening a restaurant and serving pizzas is not a path to riches, even if you can trade all your labor costs for capital investment in a lease. This restaurant is/should be just a proof of concept. The route to wealth is having other people buy your equipment to set up their own robopizza shops, all over the world.
anonbanker 10y ago
I was planning on doing exactly this idea in the next 3-5 years, and had told nobody about it. I considered pizza made on the way to the customer's door to be the ultimate realization of our Snow Crash future, but without all the human-related problems that come with it. Plus, one could probably clone/license Jeff Varasano's recipe[0], and deliver a better product to the customer. Unfortunately this means that Domino's will be competing in the space very soon, which I hoped would be open for disruption for another few years; but at least I have the comfort that comes from knowing that Canada is 5-10 years behind trends, even with multinational corporations (Apple Pay just got here, for instance), giving me plenty of time to get a Blue Ocean strategy developed while everyone fights over small parts of the (ahem) pie. If Zume moves to Canada rapidly, I'll definitely start to sweat. Right now, I'll be cheering them on while sitting on the sidelines. The sooner that crap pizzas like Dominos or Pizza Hut are outclassed by smaller startups the way that Uber outclassed taxi companies, the better we all are as a society. 0. http://www.varasanos.com/PizzaRecipe.htm http://www.varasanos.com/PizzaRecipe.htm

74 points by mathattack 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

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batbomb 10y ago

Not sure what this does that Costco doesn't already do

mmanfrin 10y ago

Puff piece -- the idea of cooking pizzas in a truck is a good one, but the whole 'robotics' angle is a little trite. The only automated part seemed to be the sauce (which Costco does) and moving the pizza to the oven. I like the moving-pizza-truck idea, it's a shame this had to go the route of 'robotic pizzeria' since it's so blatantly a puff piece.

bizzleDawg 10y ago
The idea of cooking on the road is great, but those wire conveyer racks that they're cooking on look like a nightmare to clean. I suspect cleaning all of those ovens will not be automatable for now either. on a different note, mini pizza ovens seem to be the best part of this startup, seems as though it could be a great product when combined with 'artisinal robot made' frozen pizza.
- Fricken 10y ago
  It seems unnessecarily complex having 56 separate ovens. Why not just one oven, that the driver loads up between deliveries? Am I missing something?
  - daxelrod 10y ago
    It looks like the individual ovens allow them to cook each pizza for a precise amount of time: At precisely 3 minutes and 15 seconds before arriving at the customer's location, the cloud commands the oven to turn on and--" Garden made the symbol of a large explosion emanating from his brain-- "BOOM, the customer gets a fresh, out-the-oven pizza delivered to their door." I'm guessing this was less complex than trying to move pizzas in and out of a larger oven in a moving vehicle.
    - ams6110 10y ago
      Baking pizza in a moving vehicle doesn't seem feasible to me. The sauce, cheese, etc. in a 600 degree oven are like soup. Turn the corner or need to make any kind of a rapid stop and it will all slosh to one side and ruin the pie.
      - daxelrod 10y ago
        They do some prebaking of the pies before they enter the truck, so I'm wondering if the truck ovens don't get that hot.
ma2rten 10y ago
I think they said they are planning to automate the other parts as well.
TheMagicHorsey 10y ago
You beat me to it. I agree. I think this article is actually more interesting because it shows you something about how a good tech PR strategy works. Bloomberg undoubtedly saw, on-site, how ridiculous the robotics narrative was, but they went with it anyways, because it makes for a more viral story. This kind of PR is a collaborative effort and win-win. If you have a tech startup you should really think about the narrative before you call in press. Think about what the audience wants from a story, and sell that. The goal of PR is to get your company noticed ... so long as you don't turn off genuine customers, you can actually go pretty far away from reality before the average user picks up on the fact that the story is mostly bullshit. I think they should have kept the CEO out of this video. He comes across as a bit too much of a shuckster. A CTO type would have been a better type. Also, instead of positioning the business as increased profit, he should have presented the reduction in labor costs as savings for the customer. That always makes a better story. The CEO's brain probably doesn't work that way, but the PR firm he hired should have given him that tip.
- colinplamondon 10y ago
  This is national media, for a local business - the audience of this is 100% investors, for the round they mention raising.
nickpsecurity 10y ago
Plus they keep forgetting that people are cheaper robots. A VC our family knows designed in 90's SmartMart: a convenience store that was totally automated. You order at fuel-pump looking Kiosks, robots pull it from stock, and machine delivers it to your car as you pay. To think grocers brag about mere self-checkouts. Unfortunately, the SmartMarts cost around $10 mil versus about $1 mil for stores underpaying & overworking humans. It folded.
- anonbanker 10y ago
  Anecdotal evidence from 20+ years ago seems like the common argument against Virtual Reality, as well. Technology got better, and cheaper. That puts previously-unattainable goals within reach. Would you argue that a $15/hour McDonald's employee will be cost-competitive with a Big Mac machine nowadays?
  - nickpsecurity 10y ago
    Depends on cost of a machine. Plus, McDonalds is a weak even if common example. Many companies push employees go focus on good service or at least sales (esp upselling). Computers still arent as good at that with a good chunk of customers rejecting them outright in such uses. Far as machines, depends on how cost of installation, maintenance, and licensing vs humans it replaces. Varies case by case.
    - anonbanker 10y ago
      McDonald's was used as an example due to their work at automating their franchises, and their comments about increasing this to full automation due to the $15 minimum wage[0]. The bigger point (and the dirty secret of globalism) is that nobody can really afford labor, especially multinationals. 0. http://www.inquisitr.com/1594675/mcdonalds-counters-minimum-wage-hike-15-automation/ http://www.inquisitr.com/1594675/mcdonalds-counters-minimum-...
      - nickpsecurity 10y ago
Keats 10y ago
Pizza trucks are very common in my hometown (south of France) so it's not really something new either.

jostmey 10y ago

Wow, they have a hose that sprays out pizza sauce and a way of putting a pizza in an oven. So how much are they saving in labor cost?

jonknee 10y ago
From the video it appears your stereotypical stoned college student working the late shift at Dominos could make pizzas at about 5-10x the rate of that robot assisted assembly line. Their "automated" method uses more people than a manual operation!

ojbyrne 10y ago

I tried this, as they had a coupon for a free pizza in Mountain View. The pizza was just ok, and considering the many choices around here for really good pizza, I probably won't actually pay for one of theirs unless I have some indication that the quality has improved.

azinman2 10y ago
That's what I care about. Interesting to hear it's only ok. There's another startup called pi (app is now called Pythagoras) that's also trying to reinvent much about pizza, and theirs is currently my fav pizza in SF (certainly for delivery). Plus it's delivered within 15 min from request!
- sharemywin 10y ago
  as far as I can tell they arn't doing much from an automation side other than contracting with a kitchen and using an app with UberRush. Also, there charging $20 for a pizza with a very small deliveyr area.
  - azinman2 10y ago
    Don't know about automation (unimportant to me) but boxes are specially designed with a non-standard material, pizzas are premade and par-baked earlier in the day so that they can do last 3 min and then deliver to you (within 15 min), centralize the initial cooking then decentralize the last for faster delivery, have 15 min delivery at all, pizza dough has been researched with former head Google chef for what works best with their pre-cooking method, they only have 3 kinds of pizza in order to make all this work, and various other things along the chain. $20 delivery for this quality and size is pretty decent/normal in SF.
mst 10y ago
It seems another user has a plan for checking this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11982016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11982016

hiou 10y ago

That robotic arm is the salary of a dominos employee for 10+ years.

bko 10y ago
Source? > How Much Do New Robots Cost? Complete with controllers and teach pendants, new industrial robotics cost from $50,000 to $80,000. Once application-specific peripherals are added, the robot system costs anywhere from $100,000 to $150,000. Reconditioned robots are a less expensive option. Typically, used robots cost half as much as new robots. Used robot prices can range between an estimated $25,000 and $40,000, and systems with application components cost between $50,000 and $75,000. Just checked out a random pizza hut and seems to be open 11 AM - 10 PM daily or 11 hours a day or 77 hours a week or 4,000 hours a year. That'll cost about 30k a year at minimum wage not counting overtime, training, hiring cost, taxes, etc. [0] https://www.robots.com/faq/show/how-much-do-industrial-robots-cost https://www.robots.com/faq/show/how-much-do-industrial-robot...
- ams6110 10y ago
  What you're leaving out is that the robot can only do one thing. The Dominos employee can do whatever is necessary including cleaning, restocking ingredients, handling customer/delivery issues, etc. Also if the robot breaks down or otherwise stops working properly it's costing you anywhere from $250-$1000/hr in lost business plus cost of emergency repairs (robot techs on call at 10pm are generally not making minimum wage).
vessenes 10y ago
Probably not, or at least it won't be at scale. Dominos employees need managers, benefits (of some sort), payroll, legal and HR.. liability insurance for when they get pissed off and do something nasty to another employee or a customer.. they cost a lot more than the hourly.
ratsbane 10y ago
There's nothing intrinsically expensive about a robot arm. It's few motors, sensors, metal, plastic, and something like a raspberry pi. With cheaper components and volume production a robot arm could cost less than a Domino's employee makes in a week.

Aelinsaar 10y ago

So basically, it's the tech for a high-volume operation, without the volume? Oh SF...

whyenot 10y ago

A consumer isn't going to care about the automation. Does the pizza taste good? I'm especially interested in how these "mobile ovens" will work out. If a delivery is 1 mile away vs 5 miles away, length of time in the oven will be different, yet you don't want to deliver under-baked dough or something that is burnt.

rm999 10y ago
The video in the article says they automatically turn the oven on when they're 3 minutes from the delivery (they have like 50 ovens in the truck). I think that's actually the coolest part of their idea.
- ratsbane 10y ago
  I wonder how they power that. Propane?
- jonknee 10y ago
  That many ovens seems ridiculous considering the pizzas need assembled and par baked before getting loaded into the truck. If I order my pie I have to wait until 50 other people get theirs, the driver returns to the store and loads up another 50 and then I get mine?
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aestetix 10y ago

So.... when all the people who were cooking the pizzas are out of work, who will be left to buy the pizzas? The same goes for all low wage jobs that are being automated away. I'm not sure how many people have really thought through the long term implications of what happens when you automate all the "grunt" work. As a successful business, your income comes from customers. Your customers need to make money somehow. All this automation seems like it will actually kill market liquidity. Edit: the obvious response is "a new market will move in. disrupting the old." However, I don't think the radio->television (and so on) analogy actually applies here, since it is demonstrable that there the new technologies replaced old technologies, rather than employees.

mason55 10y ago
That is why YC is investigating guaranteed basic income.
- aestetix 10y ago
  The problem with basic income is it transfers the source of the paycheck from a company to the government. Right now, if I have an issue with my paycheck, I can go to the government for recourse. If my paycheck comes from the government, how do I achieve my check and balance? Also, it's already been established that Silicon Valley is not so happy with the government, so displacing an entire working class and making them dependent on the government would grant the government a power that seems against SV's interests.
  - nemonemo 10y ago
    Then you need to rely on the checks and balances between branches of the government. As you said, the checks and balances are ripe for disruption or at least improvement.
    - aestetix 10y ago
      We already do that to some extent. Keep in mind the class distinction between someone working for the government on their own volition (police officers, military, etc), versus someone using it as a resort-- welfare recipients, SSI, veterans, etc. The other thing to keep in mind, when you work for a company, at least in theory you hold a leverage of being able to quit and go to another job. If you're getting checks from the government (and possibly not working), you lose this leverage.

bko 10y ago

I think the upside of this method is not only the efficiency of reducing the human labor cost, but the consistency of eating something made by robots. Above all else, many Americans prefer consistency, which helps explain the popularity of many chain restaurants. Companies like Starbucks and McDonalds go to great efforts to ensure product control and proper training with minimal variability in the product quality. Also other exciting options include A/B testing which can provide a better feedback loop than manually tinkering and trying to tease out consumer preference.

ghaff 10y ago

> "Just imagine Domino's without the labor component," said Garden. "You can start to see how incredibly profitable that can be." So that quote leads me to imagine crappy pizza that's maybe a little cheaper than other crappy pizza. Doesn't exactly make me want to rush out and try it.

noir_lord 10y ago
It would be a little cheaper for you and massively more profitable to them (at least until everyone else adds robots).
- petra 10y ago
  Idk. Pizza takes very little labor in making it, while the place, ingredients, logistics and marketing are quite complex.
bko 10y ago
It appears that millions of Americans prefer Dominos pizza considering they command 25% of the US pizza delivery market and sell 1.5 mm pies a day. Sorry their pizza isn't up to your standards. http://marketrealist.com/2015/03/dominos-pizza-serving-1-5-million-pies-day/ http://marketrealist.com/2015/03/dominos-pizza-serving-1-5-m...
- kyledrake 10y ago
  Are they up to yours? I agree with the spirit of the poster. Nobody's going to lose sleep with anticipation for a cheaper McDonalds (that delivers!).
  - bko 10y ago
    I think Domino's pizza is great. I don't think you're the target market for McDonalds but they feed a lot of lower income Americans. If they can reduce costs and help those Americans save a little bit of money, it would be greatly beneficial.

some1else 10y ago

So, the industrial robot hand, nicknamed Bruno[1], withdraws the pizza from the conveyor belt and places it in the oven. 1: https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/i07.f8rTkb8w/v0/-999x-999.gif https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/i07.f8rTkb8...

exDM69 10y ago

Does anyone know how much automation is happening at a frozen pizza bakery/factory? The bakery industry has fairly elaborate robotics already, the ones in the video don't seem that revolutionary to me compared to an episode of "How it's made". I'd gladly eat robot pizza, though. Good luck to these guys.

tansey 10y ago

I guess I don't understand what is really novel about this. Don't brands like Digiorno and Freschetta already have highly-optimized pizza assembly lines? Is it really that hard to make the topping/sauce dispensing dynamic instead of static? I also don't understand the appeal of having the pizza be super hot-n-ready. If you have an efficient baking-to-delivery pipeline, and an insulated container for the pizza, then how much are you really improving the quality? Ten minutes of sitting still in an insulated bag is fine with me. And how do they handle the hand-off issue with an AUV? You get a notification and then the car sits there waiting to deliver the pizza for several minutes while you walk outside? At that point, the pizza is just as cold as it would have been if you had a human bring one to your door-- and at least the latter doesn't make you put on shoes. Just seems fraught with issues that really require what you might call "AUV-complete" or "robot-complete" tech. If you have a very smart, powerful drone that is capable of picking up a pizza, keeping it warm, and effectively delivering it to people's doors with 99.99% reliability, then this sounds obvious. Otherwise, this seems like an idea that's too soon to succeed.

bpicolo 10y ago
I agree. This doesn't look particularly innovative in that regard. Pizza sounds like a pretty easy food to assembly-line. I guess the difference is really fresh vs raw end goal?
vessenes 10y ago
So if you are a deep pizza nerd, the pitch that you'd have a neo-neapolitan style pizza at your door in short order is a great pitch. The issue with fulfilling this pitch is that pizzaiolos are expensive, hot ovens are hard to get close to people, etc. etc. Trying to solve all this is probably at one level a 'passion project' for a Valley engineer. A true 90 second Neapolitan pizza does not age that well, the crust is going to be soft under the tomato sauce, and it will get a bit nasty if it sits long. It's supposed to be oven to plate to mouth very quickly. On the other hand, could this be a business, not a passion project? Most restaurant gross margin is under 50%, declining the fancier the restaurant. That's before labor and other fixed costs, meaning restaurants are generally a pennies business. Pizza though, pizza has like 90% gross margin. If you could get rid of labor, you'd have a huge advantage economically against competitors.

nier 10y ago

Going into the article, I was very curious how they would handle the dough. It seems to me the video shows they are simply pressing it flat. So pizza nerds are not their intended market. http://recipes.howstuffworks.com/tools-and-techniques/tossing-a-pizza-101.htm http://recipes.howstuffworks.com/tools-and-techniques/tossin...

coherentpony 10y ago

I'm genuinely curious, what's the difference between robots replacing American jobs and foreigners replacing American jobs? Politicians go to great lengths to protect the sanctity of American jobs by passing strict immigration regulations and instantiating border checkpoints hundreds of miles inside the border. They don't seem to be mirroring their actions for robots.

grondilu 10y ago
> what's the difference between robots replacing American jobs and foreigners replacing American jobs? Complaining about the latter makes you sound xenophobic.
- goldenkey 10y ago
  Its less about xenonorphism and more about lower standards and willingness to work for wages that require 5 people to share an apartment.
ZoeZoeBee 10y ago
Inevitability and lack of resources. We can all agree that robots are in the process of replacing many careers regardless of immigration. When the robot needs replacing you purchase a new robot. When the low skilled worker you imported is made obsolete by an even cheaper robot, now that worker must be taken care of by the state. Chances are that worker also plans on reproducing during their life, creating more unnecessary workers
thaumasiotes 10y ago
Foreigners bring their own culture along with them; robots can't do that. http://www.unz.com/gnxp/norway-offers-migrants-a-lesson-no-rapin/ http://www.unz.com/gnxp/norway-offers-migrants-a-lesson-no-r... > Migrants themselves can often be quite frank and astute observers of cross-cultural differences: > “Men have weaknesses and when they see someone smiling it is difficult to control,” Mr. Kelifa said, explaining that in his own country, Eritrea, “if someone wants a lady he can just take her and he will not be punished,” at least not by the police. Outsourcing would be a much closer parallel.

kneel 10y ago

>Alex Garden. Garden, 41, is the former president of Zynga Studios. Before that, he was a general manager of Microsoft's Xbox Live. Xbox? Zynga? This company will have us buying $10 pizza-points for pies that cost $7. Also you could sign up for credit cards to get coupons.

cgcardona 10y ago

In other words an assembly line? What about the machine learning algos which suggest pizzas based on previous purchases. What about the convolutional networks to recognize that each spray of sauce is truly unique and 'artisanal?' Where was the speech recognition for ordering and the oven encapsulating drone delivery swarm?

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xivzgrev 10y ago

He wants to take over pizza delivery industry but charges $18 for a pizza? Dominoes charges something like $10 for 2 mediums. The pizza delivery market is about acceptable quality, fast delivery, and low prices. Is he doing the elon musk strategy, where eventually he will undercut dominoes on price?

wyc 10y ago

Just looking at the delivery/cooking truck, I'm suddenly reminded of the opening chapter in Snow Crash: """ The analysts at CosaNostra Pizza University concluded that it was just human nature and you couldn't fix it, and so they went for a quick cheap technical fix: smart boxes. The pizza box is a plastic carapace now, corrugated for stiffness, a little LED readout glowing on the side, telling the Deliverator how many trade imbalanceproducing minutes have ticked away since the fateful phone call. There are chips and stuff in there. The pizzas rest, a short stack of them, in slots behind the Deliverator's head. Each pizza glides into a slot like a circuit board into a computer, clicks into place as the smart box interfaces with the onboard system of the Deliverator's car. The address of the caller has already been inferred from his phone number and poured into the smart box's builtin RAM. From there it is communicated to the car, which computes and projects the optimal route on a heads-up display, a glowing colored map traced out against the windshield so that the Deliverator does not even have to glance down. """ https://chnm.gmu.edu/courses/omalley/120f02/victory/snowcrash.html https://chnm.gmu.edu/courses/omalley/120f02/victory/snowcras...

hokkos 10y ago

Look like an inefficient frozen pizza factory like here https://youtu.be/ElQG6ZYR4zg https://youtu.be/ElQG6ZYR4zg

deveshparekh 10y ago

The kitchen opens today at noon. Instead of speculating about whether having an oven in the delivery truck makes a better pizza, I'll order a pizza today and then order the exact same pizza in August when they start using their oven truck and see if I notice any difference. If anybody else wants to try, you can use my referral code (https://zumepizza.com/#/r/593698 https://zumepizza.com/#/r/593698), which will give you a free pizza and give me a free pizza credit to fund the August portion of my experiment. I just hope nobody from Zume reads this and intentionally sabotages today's pizza.

simbalion 10y ago

Not to rain on the parade but terrible brand Dominos invented the robotic pizza kitchen, not these guys.

scottlocklin 10y ago

This is either going to end up dominating the food delivery business (unlikely, but possible) or present yet another case study in Silicon Valley delusions. It's entirely possible, easy even, to automate the pizza making process. You can go to the grocery store and purchase frozen pizzas which have never been touched by human hands. Exactly none of them are made by industrial robots. Industrial robots cost more than a pizza assembly line does, and they don't do anything that the line can't do. The only way this could make sense is if they could get them robots to make lots of other things, but, well "best of luck with that." At $18 for a pizza, they obviously aren't saving enough money on labor to pass this on to consumers.

thaumasiotes 10y ago
> You can go to the grocery store and purchase frozen pizzas which have never been touched by human hands. Exactly none of them are made by industrial robots. Industrial robots cost more than a pizza assembly line does, and they don't do anything that the line can't do. What's an industrial robot? Why is a fully-automated assembly line not considered robotic?
- JoeAltmaier 10y ago
  I think it is - anything that measures and responds is 'robotic'. http://www.refrigeratedfrozenfood.com/articles/83570-pizza-processing-spotlight http://www.refrigeratedfrozenfood.com/articles/83570-pizza-p...
oxide 10y ago
I can get a cheap, shitty pizza for 8.50 out the door, with a max wait of 10 minutes at the local Lil Caesers. Thats a human made, human served pizza. How is this pie equivalent in price to the more premium pizza I can have across the street at Round Table, also served and made by humans? It doesn't add up.
carterehsmith 10y ago
Questions for people with some knowledge of engineering (I got none). It is about the 56-oven pizza truck: - How much power (or propane or whatever) do you need to run these ovens? - How much heat they emit in the truck, as a waste? Looks like some cooling is required. How much power for that. - What is the power source for the above items. Fuel, propane, batteries? - It kind of looks dangerous to have fuel or propane or batteries next to a bunch of running ovens? If so, where to put the fuel and where to put the engine. - Having flammable cardboard where the ovens are looks too dangerous. How do they get the pizza from the oven to the cardboard? I hope it's not the poor driver squeezing between a bunch of running ovens to get to the right one and get the pizza out?

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dsr_ 10y ago

They shouldn't want to be in the pizza business. They should want to be in the pizza-robot (-truck, etc.) business. Actually opening a restaurant and serving pizzas is not a path to riches, even if you can trade all your labor costs for capital investment in a lease. This restaurant is/should be just a proof of concept. The route to wealth is having other people buy your equipment to set up their own robopizza shops, all over the world.

anonbanker 10y ago

I was planning on doing exactly this idea in the next 3-5 years, and had told nobody about it. I considered pizza made on the way to the customer's door to be the ultimate realization of our Snow Crash future, but without all the human-related problems that come with it. Plus, one could probably clone/license Jeff Varasano's recipe[0], and deliver a better product to the customer. Unfortunately this means that Domino's will be competing in the space very soon, which I hoped would be open for disruption for another few years; but at least I have the comfort that comes from knowing that Canada is 5-10 years behind trends, even with multinational corporations (Apple Pay just got here, for instance), giving me plenty of time to get a Blue Ocean strategy developed while everyone fights over small parts of the (ahem) pie. If Zume moves to Canada rapidly, I'll definitely start to sweat. Right now, I'll be cheering them on while sitting on the sidelines. The sooner that crap pizzas like Dominos or Pizza Hut are outclassed by smaller startups the way that Uber outclassed taxi companies, the better we all are as a society. 0. http://www.varasanos.com/PizzaRecipe.htm http://www.varasanos.com/PizzaRecipe.htm