Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

food robots

Announcing the Smart Kitchen Summit 2018 Program

Hard to believe, but we’re just six weeks away from the Smart Kitchen Summit, our flagship industry event that brings hundreds of executives, innovators, startups and media together in Seattle’s Benaroya Hall for two days to forge the future of food, cooking, and the kitchen.

It’s been three years since we held our first in an old cannery in 2015, and since that time we’ve become the hub across three continents for the world’s biggest brands in appliances, food, and tech to connect and discuss food tech.

And now, after lots of emails, planning meetings and Google sheet rejiggering, we’ve released our agenda for the Smart Kitchen Summit! We’ve got an incredible lineup with panels, TED-style talks and fireside chats featuring some of the most exciting people in the space. Check it out!

A few highlights:

  • The Wall Street Journal’s Wilson Rothman will sit down with the person who ran product on both the Amazon Echo and the Juicero –  Malachy Moynihan – to ask why kitchen products succeed or fail.
  • Dr. Karsten Ottenberg, the CEO of one of the world’s biggest appliance manufacturers, BSH Appliances, will talk about how his company is building its future around services.
  • Executives from Cafe X, Chowbotics and Zimplistic will talk about the future of food robotics
  • Walmart’s VP of Food Safety Frank Yiannas will speak on a panel with Raja Ramachandran of Ripe.io and Jasmine Crowe of Goodr about the potential for blockchain to increase transparency and reduce waste throughout the food system.
  • The CEOs of June, Brava, Tovala, and Suvie will talk about how cooking appliances will change over the next decade.
  • We’ll find out why Eli Holzman, the creator of Project Runway & Project Greenlight, has made the intersection of technology and cooking his next big project.
  • Tom Mastrobuoni of Tyson Ventures, Carmen Palafox of Make in L.A., and Brian Frank of FTW ventures will explore strategies for food tech investment, from hardware to CPG and beyond.

That’s just the start. We have sessions on personalized food, the future of restaurants, AI & food, cooking robots, food & cooking data, blockchain & food, IoT security in the smart kitchen, reinvention of the grocery store and much more.

Peppered throughout the day we’ll also have 12 new startups (companies to be announced soon!) pitching their companies before a panel of investors and executives. Our panel of judges will vote on the winner, who will get a $10,000 cash prize! You can view the new full conference schedule here.

Our last shows have all sold out, so make sure you grab your tickets now, and we’ll see you in October!

Bear Robotics’ Penny Clocks in at Pizza Hut in South Korea

Pizza Hut in South Korea today announced it is rolling out a new robotic employee at one of its Seoul restaurants. While the robot is called Dilly Plate there, Spoon readers might know it better as “Penny,” the self-driving dish busser robot from Bay Area startup Bear Robotics.

Dilly Plate/Penny is a squat, bowling pin-shaped robot with a flat surface that can shuttle food and empty plates around a restaurant (humans still need to load and unload it). Penny is being put to work in smaller restaurants in California such Kang Nam Tofu House in Milpitas and the chain restaurant Amici’s Pizza — but now it’s about to travel the world.

The Korean Herald reports that Dilly Plate’s engagement at the Seoul restaurant is a little more limited, with Pizza Hut “employing” the robot for just a two-week test run.

The Herald, however, credits Dilly Plate as being developed by Woowa Brothers Corp., not Bear Robotics. This could be because Woowa invested $2 million in Bear Robotics in April of this year, or it could just be an oversight (we sent a note to Bear Robotics for clarification). On Linkedin however, Bear Robotics Founder and CEO, John Ha proudly exclaimed “Bear Robotics in Pizza Hut in Seoul Korea!”

Regardless of who gets credit, the bigger story here is the relentless march of robots into our restaurant experience. They are becoming ubiquitous. Dilly Plate/Penny expedites front of house service, while robots like Flippy fry up burgers in the back (or chicken tenders at the ballpark). And in restaurants like Spyce Kitchen in Boston, robots do all the cooking.

But it’s not just here in the U.S. — robots are going global. In addition to Dilly Plate in Korea, Ekim has its pizza-making robot restaurant in Europe, Alibaba has its robots scurrying around Robot.he in Shanghai, and MontyCafe will make you a latte in Russia.

All this automation means that traditional human-powered labor in restaurants is going away, or at least transitioning into a different role. Robots like Penny were designed to let humans focus on more high-level tasks like customer interaction. However, what will that transformation look like once the majority of foodservice jobs are taken by the ‘bots (which might happen soon as they’re quickly getting more dexterous)?

Want to learn more? Make sure to get your tickets for the Smart Kitchen Summit this October in Seattle, where you can catch Bear Robotics CEO John Ha speak about the future of food robots. See you there!

The Weekly Spoon: Laboring over Labels and Go Go Robo Restaurants!

This is a the post version of our weekly (twice-weekly, actually) newsletter. If you’d like to get the weekly Spoon in your inbox, you can subscribe here. 

By now we are all inured to the “fake news” label casually thrown about on a daily basis. But now the discussion over what is real and what isn’t is seeping into the labels we give our meat and milk. Science has brought about a wave of innovation in those fields, and traditional makers of those products are none too happy.

Groups representing cattlemen and ranchers sent a letter to President Trump asking his administration to bring regulation of lab-grown, or cultured, meat under the USDA. This follows a different letter from farm bureaus and agricultural groups sent to the FDA asking them to crack down on what types of drinks can actually be called milk. (The hullabaloo over milk even earned a mocking segment on Stephen Colbert’s Late Show.)

These moves reveal that we are on the cusp of a societal leap in how we eat, and incumbents are digging in. While cultured meat hasn’t hit store shelves yet, it’s a hot sector for investment and the technology keeps improving and coming down in price. Meanwhile sales of plant-based milks have soared over the past five years while the dairy industry grapples with surpluses and falling prices.

To be fair, having a discussion over what we officially label the food we put into our bodies is a worthy one to make sure we know what we are consuming. Case in point: this week the FDA gave the green light to Impossible Foods saying its heme-burgers are safe to eat, and Beyond Meat can officially slap a “non-GMO” label on its pea protein burgers.

But if we spend all our time and energy (and money) dithering over details over what we call something, before you know it, the robots will have taken over and they will decide for us.

Don’t believe me? We broke the news this week of the launch of robot food startup, Ono Food Company, which is headed up by the former VP of Operations at Cafe X. Details on Ono are slim, but it’s backed by Lemnos, Compound and Pathbreaker. It joins other restaurant robots coming online like those in Spyce Kitchen, Ekim, and Bear Robotics’ Penny.

Robots and automation are expanding into more of our everyday routines. Long John Silvers announced plans to make its drive-thrus fully automated, Pizzametry is working to put pizza vending machines in high-traffic areas like airports and dorms, and Flippy just got a new job making chicken tenders at Dodgers stadium.

Finally, there were some unexpected moves in the meal kit market this week. True Food Innovations is breathing new life into Chef’d, which abruptly shut down earlier this month. Chef’d 2.0 actually involves a number of ex-Chef’d execs, who plan to forego e-commerce and focus on retail. And Chick-Fil-A, of all places, announced an experiment to offer meal kits at a limited number of its stores in Atlanta. While I applaud the effort, I’m not sure it will work.

Whew. It was a big week! And that was just the news. We’re also hard at work assembling an awesome Smart Kitchen Summit: North America. The lineup of speakers is fantastic, the schedule is thoughtful and forward looking for food tech and tickets are on sale now!

As always, we’d love to hear from you! If you’ve got news, send us a tip, or join our Slack channel.

Have a great weekend!

Be kind. Always.

Chris

In the 07/27/2018 edition:

Traditional Meat Producers Lobby Trump Over Cultured Meat
Agricultural professional groups including the American Sheep Industry Association, National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, National Chicken Council, National Pork Producers Council and the National Turkey Federation fired off a letter to President Trump today, asking for parity when it comes to the regulation of cultured meat.

Got Milk? Are You Sure? Labeling Debate Moves on to Plant-Based Drinks
It looks like the debate over what we label cultured/lab grown/clean “meat” will not be isolated to the deli case. If the comments made by Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Scott Gottlieb today are any indication, there will be another drawn out battle over what we label as “milk.”

Stephen Colbert Mocks FDA’s Crackdown on Plant-Based Milks
On The Late Show host Stephen Colbert turned his biting wit towards a subject that’s been generating a lot of media buzz lately: the question of what to call dairy alternatives. He was referencing last week’s Politico Pro Summit, in which FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb announced that his agency would start cracking down on the use of the term “milk” for non-dairy products.

Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods Get Label Wins, Score Big for Plant-based Meat
Plant-based burger startup Impossible Foods officially got the green light from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that their patties are safe to eat. Impossible voluntarily submitted their burger to the FDA for testing last year and was surprised when the regulatory body came back to them with a big red flag concerning the burger’s not-so-secret star ingredient: heme.

Lemnos Backs Robot Restaurant Startup Ono
Restaurant robots are kinda hot. The latest evidence of this? Yet another robot restaurant startup called Ono Food Company just got funded, this time from Lemnos, Compound and Pathbreaker ventures. The amount of the funding round was undisclosed.

Now That Delivery Is All the Rage, What Happens to the Drive-Thru?
Long John Silver’s, that bastion of quick-service seafood, made a bold claim today by announcing their intent to “install the most technologically advanced digital drive-thru platforms in the restaurant industry.”

Will You Try Pizzametry’s Pizza Vending Machine?
The Pizzametry is the size of a beefy vending machine. For around $5 – $6 (prices will vary depending on location), you can order either an eight-inch cheese (no sauce), or cheese (with sauce) or pepperoni pizza. The machine is pre-loaded with canisters of frozen dough which are then thawed, cut, pressed, topped and cooked at 700 degrees to make a pizza in three and a half minutes (that time actually goes down to 90 seconds on subsequent pizzas if you order more than one).

Chef’d Assets Acquired by True Food Innovations, to Focus on Retail
True Food Innovations, a food technology, CPG and manufacturing company, today announced that it has acquired the assets of meal kit maker, Chef’d, which abruptly shuttered operations earlier this month. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Chick-fil-A is Paving the Way for Fast Food Meal Kits
Each Chick-fil-A box will contain fresh, pre-measured ingredients to make one of five meals, from chicken enchiladas to chicken flatbread to pan-roasted chicken. (Sense a theme here?) The kits will cost $15.89, feed two people, and can be prepared in 30 minutes or less.

Chick-Fil-A’s Uncanny Valley Problem with Meal Kits
When popular fast food chain, Chick-Fil-A announced it would be experimenting with meal kits next month, I agreed with my colleague, Catherine Lamb, that this could pave the way for a new meal kit sales channel. But in the days since the announcement I’ve soured on the notion. Now, I think consumers will have certain expectations of what a Chick-Fil-A meal kit should taste like, but will instead experience the uncanny valley.

Lemnos Backs Robot Restaurant Startup Ono

Restaurant robots are kinda hot.

The latest evidence of this? Yet another robot restaurant startup called Ono Food Company just got funded, this time from Lemnos, Compound and Pathbreaker ventures. The amount of the funding round was undisclosed.

While the specifics of Ono’s technology are still under wraps, I’d guess from the company’s description that they’re making restaurant robotics for fast food:

“Backed by Lemnos, Compound, and Pathbreaker Ventures, Ono Food Co. is building robotic systems to revolutionize the way we eat. We’re on a mission to create and serve delicious meals with high-quality ingredients at an affordable price.”

Vague, right? But from the looks of it, Ono could be building something similar to Spyce, which essentially is a robotic fast-food restaurant.  And while the term “serve” may have been a toss-in, I wonder if they’re also look at creating something similar to Bear Robotics’ Penny, a robotic busser/server robot.

Another interesting aspect of Ono is the founding team. The company’s CEO is Stephen Klein, who was previously the VP of Operations at Cafe X, the robotic coffee shop in a box startup based in California. The company’s CTO is Daniel Fukuba, who previously led an engineering team for a robotic automation company L2F. According to Fukaba’s Linkedin profile, some of the projects he’s led in the past for L2F include building a robotic assembly for a SpaceX rocket engine and a chocolate inspection and packaging robot. Even more interestingly, Fukaba also did early design work on robotic burger flipper Creator for the then-called Momentum Machines back in 2015.

The funding of Ono is not surprising. Over the past year we’ve seen a number of restaurant robotics startups get funding rounds, including Miso, Zume, EKIM and Chowbotics among others.

One reason the venture capital community thinks restaurant robotics are an interesting opportunity is because big restaurant chain execs are saying now’s the time for automation.

“We think we’ve hit the point where labor-wage rates are now making automation of those tasks make a lot more sense,” said Bob Wright, COO of Wendy’s, on a conference call last year.

These sentiments are being echoed by economists as well, who believe fast food is one of the first industries that will be significantly disrupted by robotics. While there are bigger societal questions about big food chains like how Wendy’s and McDonalds can gracefully replace existing workers with robotics for high-volume tasks, investors mainly care about making a return on investment.

And quotes like those from the COO of Wendy’s are all they need to hear to validate an emerging market.

Want to hear more about restaurant robots? Make sure to come to the Smart Kitchen Summit, the only event about the reinvention of cooking at home and in restaurants. 

Zume Unveils Its New Pizza Robot, Vincenzo

Zume, the Bay Area startup that uses data, robotics and mobile ovens to optimize pizza delivery, today announced that it has added Vincenzo, a new robot that will take over the dangerous task of taking pizzas crusts out of hot ovens, to the company’s roster.

Before getting into the specifics of Vincenzo (named after the Italian gentleman who would fly from Italy to maintain Zume’s pizza ovens), it’s important to understand how Zume works.

Zume, which only operates in certain locations in the Bay Area, uses data analytics and AI to precisely forecast how many pizzas (and what types) will be needed for deliveries that evening. To prepare the pizzas for delivery, the crusts are par-baked before toppings are added at the production facility.

Par-baking the crust used to require a human sticking their arms in and out of 800 degree ovens hundreds of times a day to remove pizzas and place them on the appropriate rack. This type of repetitive motion could lead to burns that injure us fleshy humans. Vincenzo’s robot arm, on the other hand (no pun intended) feels no pain, and can remove a crust without tearing or breaking it every 8 seconds.

“We’ve had this hardcore point of view on automation of labor,” Alex Garden, CEO of Zume told me. “There is social responsibility around this. Automation exists to improve the quality of human lives.”

In addition to being impervious to pain, Vincenzo is also precise. Once pizzas are topped by humans, Vincenzo pulls them off another conveyor belt and, with guidance from Zume’s AI, places them on a corresponding specified rack that goes on the van where they are fully cooked en route to delivery.

Vincenzo joins the growing Zume robot family which also includes Bruno, who loads pizzas into the oven, and sauce bots Pepe and Giorgio. But Garden is quick to point out that he does not see robots as replacements for humans. “We are co-botic, not robotic,” he said. Garden also said that robots taking the more dangerous, repetitive jobs frees up people to do higher-level tasks, like caring for the pizza’s mother dough.

Another job that humans are (presumably) better at is that of company president, and Zume just added a new one. Zume also announced today that Rhonda Lesinski-Woolf is now President of Zume Pizza. She joins the company after having served as Sr. Vice President of Schools for Revolution Foods. Prior to that, she was Chief Marketing Officer and Sr. Vice President of Product Management at Del Monte.

In addition to managing robots and humans, Lesinski will also need to fend off the company’s automated competition. Making pizza seems like an increasingly popular vocation for robots: Little Caesar’s has a patent for a pizza robot, and over in Europe, EKIM just raised 2.2 million euros to build its own robot-pizza restaurant.

Zume is also expanding beyond its pizza origins. In April the company announced that it would open up its data and logistics platform to other restaurants, and partnered with Welbilt to create vans that could cook other types of cuisine on the go.

If you like pizza robots, you should definitely check out The Spoon Automat, our weekly podcast about food robots and AI.

Chowbotics Snaps up $11M to go Big on Robot Food Bowls

Chowbotics, the startup behind Sally, the salad making robot, announced yesterday that it has raised $11 million in a “Series A-1.” This new round follows the $5 million Series A the company raised in March of last year, and brings the total amount raised to $17.3 million.

TechCrunch reports that the company will be using the new money to expand beyond salads and into bowls, writing that Chowbotics is looking into “grain bowls, breakfast bowls, poke bowls, açai bowls and yogurt bowls,” among others.

You can see Sally in action in this video we shot of it making a salad last year:

With Sally, Chowbotics is at the forefront of reinventing the vending machine. Using a combination of robotics, AI and fresh ingredients, Chowbotics is evolving fast, automated food choices in building lobbies and other high volume public spaces beyond Snickers bars and Cheetos.

So we’re curious as to how this bowl building will take shape. Will it be a smaller, vending machine-sized robot like Sally, or the smoothie-making robot, Albert? Or will the cooking element necessitate it being bigger, like the kiosk-sized robots by 6d Bytes and Briggo? Or will it be a full-on restaurant, like Spyce Kitchen, which just opened recently and features its own bowl-based menu?

We reached out to Chowbotics to find out more, and will update this post with any reply. But the company definitely cannot rest on its kale roots and will need to show the flexibility and scalability of its technology in order to stay competitive.

Automation is a hot area right now and food robots in particular. Caliburger recently reinstated Flippy the burger cooking robot, Connected Robotics in Japan is rolling out its Takoyaki robot this summer, Ekim raised 2.2 million euros to build a pizza robot restaurant, Sony has teamed up with Carnegie Mellon to build food robots, and during our recent Smart Kitchen Summit: Europe, I drank a fantastic cocktail served up by Foodpairing’s robot bartender.

If you want to know more about the future of food robots and artificial intelligence, subscribe to our podcast, The Automat, which hosts weekly discussions with those people building the future of robotic food today.

Spyce Kitchen Robot Restaurant Opening This Spring

Spyce, the meal making robot from minds of MIT alums, will open its first restaurant location this Spring in Boston, and is holding a press event on May 1 to explain its automated, futuristic, vision of fast food.

The Spyce Kitchen is a fully contained, self-cleaning robot kiosk that refrigerates, mixes, cooks and serves up a selection of “bowl” meals. You can see an earlier version of Spyce in action at the MIT dining hall in this video Futurism posted two years ago.

An Autonomous Kitchen That Will Cook, Serve, And Clean For You

The team from Spyce has partnered with Chef Daniel Boulud to come up with recipes fit for a space age restaurant robot. According to The New Yorker, the latest incarnation of the Spyce Kitchen has been approved by the National Sanitation Foundation for commercial use, and later this month, a Spyce restaurant location will open to customers and create seven different types of bowls at $7.50 a piece.

Spyce is part of a new cohort of self-contained food robot kiosks popping up all around us. In addition to Spyce, there is the Cafe X robot coffee shop, Chowbotics’s salad making robot, Sally, and 6d bytes’ new Blendid smoothie maker bot.

We love food robots here at The Spoon and can’t wait to check out the Spyce in action.

Breville’s New Espresso Machine Is Almost Like A Home Robot Barista

It’s no secret that robots are changing the way the food and beverage industry is creating food, serving its customers, designing products and automating tasks that used to belong to people. Startups like Cafe X are actually staffed with fully robotic baristas who will make you a delightful (and fast) cup of coffee with no real human involvement.

But it’s not just Silicon Valley startups getting in the mix – companies like Breville are thinking about how to automate tasks and deliver appliances that give consumers quality without leaving the house. Enter Breville’s newest invention, the Oracle Touch, which is the closest you can probably get to hiring a barista to come to your house and make you the perfect espresso-based beverage. The Oracle Touch has – you guessed it – a touchscreen and a bunch of advanced technology inside that gives it the ability to create a drink from scratch without much human input at all.

The Oracle will grind the beans, tamp down the ground espresso, infuse and pour a shot and steam your milk of choice to the exact desired standards (without anyone having to hold the wand or container.) In a market where fancy espresso machines usually require some know-how and Keurig-type machines make brewing coffee with a button-push super simple, it makes sense for Breville to try and create the best of both worlds.

The machine, of course, isn’t cheap and not meant to be a hugely mainstream device. But Wired reviewer and food writer Joe Ray has a lot of great things to say about the Oracle, including:

“The Oracle cleverly straddles a line, offering an impressive amount of customization and hands-on time, while automating enough that you’d have to try hard to make a bad drink…for those who are able to plunk down $2,500 on an espresso maker, Breville has created an outstanding machine.”

I took first balked at the price, but when considering my $4.50 a day soy latte habit, I spend about half the cost of a Breville automated espresso machine in a year on barista-created beverages. And I have to leave my house to get them.

Does this type of technology mean we’ll see the downfall of the traditional coffeehouse? Not likely. Robotics and automation are certainly disrupting many areas of the food service industry, but coffee shops still offer a product and an atmosphere that many people can’t or don’t want to replicate at home. While the price points of home automated espresso machines might come down over time, the more likely impact will be to baristas themselves as automation and advancements in robotics are coming close to replacing the job of grinding, measuring, stamping, steaming and combining ingredients to create the perfect caffeinated beverage.

Robot or Cobot? Companies Taking Varying Paths As Food Robots Reach Viability

Flying in the face of the claim of being “the best first job in America,” burger chains and other fast food eateries are on the brink of replacing young workers with machines. Labor costs (especially the fight for a higher minimum wage) and shrinking profits are driving changes. Specifically, the strategic move is to deploy self-service kiosks and burger-flipping robots at such places as Wendy’s and McDonalds. Both of these fast food outlet have announced some tech-driven strategies aimed at improving the bottom line.

Drawing the most attention in this area is Miso Robotics’ “Flippy,” a kitchen assistant equipped with a camera, sensor and AI software. It can cook a hamburger to a perfect temperature by flipping it at predetermined intervals. The machine is built to place the hamburger on a bun and even work collaboratively with human workers. The human worker can pitch in by adding toppings and wrapping the food for service.

Miso Robotics joins other companies such as Chowbotics. This company, by creating a robot (the size of a dorm refrigerator), can make a salad, eliminating the need for salad bars and often inaccurate hand-made greenery orders. Wanting to own the entire process, San Francisco’s Momentum Machines is in the process of opening its own retail location featuring its robotic technology that can crank out 400 custom burgers an hour.

Flippy is scheduled to be implemented in 2018 by CaliBurger, a chain with locations in California, Washington State, Washington D.C., Canada, Mexico, China, Kuwait, Malaysia and other spots around the world. The first implementation of Flippy with be at a CaliBurger outlet in Los Angeles.

“We take into account all of our customers’ needs for everything from food safety to maximum uptime,” Miso Robotics CEO David Zito told CNBC. “Today our software allows robots to work at a grill, doing some of the nasty and dangerous work that people don’t want to do all day. But these systems can be adapted so that robots can work, say, standing in front of a fryer or chopping onions. These are all areas of high turnover, especially for quick service restaurants.”

If you marry robotic technology, cloud computing, and keen market awareness, the result is Zume Pizza, a San Francisco startup rewriting the rules in food delivery. In a recent Smart Kitchen Show podcast, Zume’s co-founder Julia Collins explained some of the “secret sauce” that separates her company from other tech-enabled food delivery players.

The process, Collins said, is what she calls a “co-bot” culture where tasks are divided between robots and humans where repetitive and dangerous tasks such as making perfectly shaped dough balls and taking a pie in and out of an 800-degree oven are handled by robots. The more artisanal parts of the process are tackled by humans.

Zume’s delivery service stand alone in the market by deploying carefully designed pizza wagons that take partially cooked pizzas and, using predictive analytics, provides a movable storefront where pies can be sent to areas based on demand and data-driven factors such as holidays. The concept is a logistics marvel that breaks the mold of needing to open multiple storefronts to serve a wide geographic area.

Doing an 180 from its campaign touting its role in lives of first-time workers, McDonald’s is using technology to cut down on the number of counter staff it employs. McDonald’s claims its new service-service, touchscreen ordering kiosks—which it will add to 2,500 of its restaurants—won’t eliminate cashier jobs but instead move those workers to more customer-service positions such as concierges.

“MCD is cultivating a digital platform through mobile ordering and Experience of the Future (EOTF), an in-store technological overhaul most conspicuous through kiosk ordering and table delivery,” Andrew Charles of analyst firm Cowen told Wall Street Investors.

The new technology will cost each franchisee between $150,000 and $700,000 with the parent company picking up an undisclosed part of the tab.

Podcast: Robot (and Big Data) Pizza: A Conversation With Zume Pizza’s Julia Collins

In today’s podcast, I talk with Zume Pizza cofounder Julia Collins.

If you’ve read an article about Zume Pizza, chances are it focused on the how the company is using robotics to make pizza more efficiently.

But here’s the thing: while robot-assisted pizza production IS interesting, it is NOT what’s the most intriguing part about Zume Pizza’s business. No, what makes Zume Pizza revolutionary is it’s the application of data analysis combined with what the company calls an “elastic” pizza delivery network that pushes final cook and delivery to where the most demand.

In a sense, the company is applying cloud computing concepts to pizza creation, bringing the ability to scale fast to meet demand with highly efficient resources.

This makes sense for a whole bunch of reasons. Traditional retail fast food involves hundreds of thousands – even sometimes millions of dollars – in fixed cost associated with each (to use a telecom term) “point of presence”, but once the store is built you’re stuck in one place. Why not move to meet demand where it’s at, when it’s at?

That is exactly what Zume is doing with a network of mobile pizza trucks that do final-cook in smart ovens and through a fleet of scooters that bring the pizza to the consumer’s home.

Enjoy the podcast.