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Three things: (1) In a fully automatized economy, owning a link in the last mile of food delivery is valuable. (2) You could make a USP out of "our robots are

Three things: (1) In a fully automatized economy, owning a link in the last mile of food delivery is valuable. (2) You could make a USP out of "our robots are clean: best hyghienic condotions for your pizza." This works until some journalist finds leaked machine oil in your tomato cake. (3) The wisdom of the ages speaks of being ten times better. The design goal for the iPhone was to be ten times better, than other smart phones of that era. Not just better. Ten times better. I fail to see how current pizza delivery can be improved ten times. Maybe it can. But it's pretty good already.

deltaninenine 3y ago
>The wisdom of the ages speaks of being ten times better. This is an efficiency move. Cut the human out of the loop. Looks like the failure is less about creating an assembly line and more about creating a mobile assembly line.
- Fordec 3y ago
  Not just cut the human out, but I must also assume having it truck based cuts out building rental/ownership costs also
- iepathos 3y ago
  Failure in the mobile assembly line is what the article mentions but is kind of irrelevant if you're still just selling pizzas to people. No one really cares about buying pizza from this unknown company so they have no product market fit. imo cutting minimum wage humans out of the loop will not yield a big enough profit weighed against the machine and vehicle maintenance costs combined with the skilled labor costs to deal with them.
- kevinventullo 3y ago
  So maybe ~10x cheaper? I wonder what is the cost of ingredients for a $20 pizza. $2 seems low.
  - newman8r 3y ago
    Flour costs less than 50 cents, sauce maybe 25 cents, probably at least $1-2 for cheap wholesale cheese, plus toppings.
    - SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago
      Hot pizza ovens aren't free to buy or operate. It's hotter than a normal kitchen oven, and energy isn't free.
- AlotOfReading 3y ago
  It didn't truly cut most humans out of the loop. The one near my house still had 2 delivery drivers because the pizza vehicle was permanently parked down a side street. They were only saving the cost of the third, pizza cooking employee and the capital expenses of the robot truck probably outweighed that single minimum wage several times over. Their MVP was simply missing any key differentiators from established competitors except for the terrible pricing.
pgwhalen 3y ago
> I fail to see how current pizza delivery can be improved ten times. Before reading this thread's comments, I would have agreed. But I have to admit, ordering a pizza and then ten minutes later receiving it at my doorstep having been removed from the oven less than a minute ago seems like a 10x improvement to my current experience.
- EscapeFromNY 3y ago
  I'm with you. Zume would have had a better chance if they refunded $440 million of that investment money, then spent the last $10 million to buy a few trucks and hire human beings to make the pizzas.
  - pgwhalen 3y ago
    I wonder what that would cost the customer for it to be profitable. I doubt I'd pay 2x what I currently do for pizza delivery even if it was as I described above.
    - detourdog 3y ago
      Where I live Dominios can't find/afford drivers to deliver the pizza(one is in jail for Jan.6th). I find the whole premise of Zune offensive to common business sense. The demand for pizza cannot be so great that it deserves this type of automation. This complex production path effort has no chance of payoff and contributes nothing to the product the customer wanted, a pizza. The crazy thing is that pizza production is so simple and the only reason to make it complex pizza production is the business model not.
      - gnicholas 3y ago
        I assume they were starting with pizzas and planning to expand to other cuisine from there. The idea of having hot, freshly-cooked food delivered to your door is one that could be worth a ton of money. But this wasn’t the right path, apparently!
- 3y ago
jacobgorm 3y ago
We had a tiny local “startup” selling freshly made but cold gourmet Roman pinsas that you would heat up in your own oven at home. They failed for personal reasons, but while it lasted it felt like the future of takeout pizza. You can google a bit of info (in Danish) about them by searching for Spiga1991.
- justinator 3y ago
  Take-and-bake pizzas here in the States are not out of the ordinary. Papa Murphy's, etc.

deltaninenine 3y ago

>The wisdom of the ages speaks of being ten times better. This is an efficiency move. Cut the human out of the loop. Looks like the failure is less about creating an assembly line and more about creating a mobile assembly line.

Fordec 3y ago
Not just cut the human out, but I must also assume having it truck based cuts out building rental/ownership costs also
iepathos 3y ago
Failure in the mobile assembly line is what the article mentions but is kind of irrelevant if you're still just selling pizzas to people. No one really cares about buying pizza from this unknown company so they have no product market fit. imo cutting minimum wage humans out of the loop will not yield a big enough profit weighed against the machine and vehicle maintenance costs combined with the skilled labor costs to deal with them.
kevinventullo 3y ago
So maybe ~10x cheaper? I wonder what is the cost of ingredients for a $20 pizza. $2 seems low.
- newman8r 3y ago
  Flour costs less than 50 cents, sauce maybe 25 cents, probably at least $1-2 for cheap wholesale cheese, plus toppings.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago
    Hot pizza ovens aren't free to buy or operate. It's hotter than a normal kitchen oven, and energy isn't free.
AlotOfReading 3y ago
It didn't truly cut most humans out of the loop. The one near my house still had 2 delivery drivers because the pizza vehicle was permanently parked down a side street. They were only saving the cost of the third, pizza cooking employee and the capital expenses of the robot truck probably outweighed that single minimum wage several times over. Their MVP was simply missing any key differentiators from established competitors except for the terrible pricing.

pgwhalen 3y ago

> I fail to see how current pizza delivery can be improved ten times. Before reading this thread's comments, I would have agreed. But I have to admit, ordering a pizza and then ten minutes later receiving it at my doorstep having been removed from the oven less than a minute ago seems like a 10x improvement to my current experience.

EscapeFromNY 3y ago
I'm with you. Zume would have had a better chance if they refunded $440 million of that investment money, then spent the last $10 million to buy a few trucks and hire human beings to make the pizzas.
- pgwhalen 3y ago
  I wonder what that would cost the customer for it to be profitable. I doubt I'd pay 2x what I currently do for pizza delivery even if it was as I described above.
  - detourdog 3y ago
    Where I live Dominios can't find/afford drivers to deliver the pizza(one is in jail for Jan.6th). I find the whole premise of Zune offensive to common business sense. The demand for pizza cannot be so great that it deserves this type of automation. This complex production path effort has no chance of payoff and contributes nothing to the product the customer wanted, a pizza. The crazy thing is that pizza production is so simple and the only reason to make it complex pizza production is the business model not.
    - gnicholas 3y ago
      I assume they were starting with pizzas and planning to expand to other cuisine from there. The idea of having hot, freshly-cooked food delivered to your door is one that could be worth a ton of money. But this wasn’t the right path, apparently!
3y ago

jacobgorm 3y ago

We had a tiny local “startup” selling freshly made but cold gourmet Roman pinsas that you would heat up in your own oven at home. They failed for personal reasons, but while it lasted it felt like the future of takeout pizza. You can google a bit of info (in Danish) about them by searching for Spiga1991.

justinator 3y ago
Take-and-bake pizzas here in the States are not out of the ordinary. Papa Murphy's, etc.