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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Zume Pizza

UPDATED: Zume to Lay Off Staff

UPDATE: CNBC reports Zume is laying off 360 people and shutting down its pizza delivery service.

Zume, the startup famous for its pizza-making robots, is set to lay off 400 people, or 80 percent of its staff, according to a report from Business Insider (subscription required) yesterday. (See update above.)

According to Business Insider, the layoffs come as the company has faced challenges securing more funding from Softbank. Zume had raised $375 million from Softbank in November of 2018, and part of that deal was reportedly an additional $375 million investment from Softbank at a later date. Zume has raised $423 million in total to date.

Business Insider writes that the layoffs follow a number of executive departures from the company, including its CMO, general counsel, and vice president of talent, as well as the president of Zume’s original pizza business.

While Zume’s robotic pizza has typically grabbed all the headlines, the company was actually more of a data play. It claimed to be able to take tons of data like weather reports, purchasing history, and local sporting events to predict how many pizzas and what kind it needed to make in an evening. From there it would parbake and assemble the pizzas and cook them in a mobile oven on the way to being delivered.

The cook-on-the-go concept was later abandoned by the company in favor of parking mobile kitchens in designated neighborhoods in more of a hub-and-spoke model that only relied on drivers to deliver the pies over the last mile.

Zume had also placed big bets in 2019, launching a packaging business with the acquisition of compostable packaging company Pivot Packaging in June of last year, and launching a new program that was in essence a mobile ghost kitchen that restaurants could license. The first customer for that mobile ghost kitchen was &Pizza on the East Coast.

However, it looks like the money is drying up and Softbank, still dealing with WeWork’s implosion, is probably less inclined to throw more money into Zume if the returns aren’t there.

Right now, we don’t know where all the layoffs will hit and where Zume will focus its resources. Will it abandon pizza making to focus on selling packaging and licensing out its tech stack? We reached out to Zume to find out more information and will update this post as we learn more.

Report: SoftBank Cooking Up Potential $750M Investment in Zume

Bloomberg reported yesterday that Softbank Group is in discussions to invest from $500 million to $750 million into Zume, the Bay Area company that uses a combination of data, robots and specially outfitted vans to deliver hot pizza.

When news outlets write about Zume, they often focus on the robots that help make the pizza. While those are cool, the company is really about data and last-mile logistics. As we’ve written before:

Zume takes into consideration hundreds of data points, such as day of the week, weather, school calendars and more to develop predictions around how much pizza and what types of pizza will be ordered in a given location. From there a food delivery vehicle cooks up the pizza on the move and delivers it with precise timing.

This could benefit Softbank for a couple of reasons. First, Zume recently announced that it was expanding beyond pizza and bringing its delivery expertise to other types of cuisine. Basically, it is setting up a consultancy to provide Zume’s data prowess to help any restaurant figure out how to deliver their food more efficiently.

As Alex Garden, Co-Founder and CEO of Zume told us at the time of that announcement, “The truth is that we’ve developed a tech stack that will allow any restaurant to power the next generation of their business.”

As restaurant delivery grows, a platform like Zume’s could theoretically ensure that food ordered from any type of restaurant would arrive piping hot and fresh. (No one wants soggy, tepid fries.) Not for nothing, it’s also a way for Zume to scale nationally without a capital heavy investment.

Softbank’s move also plays nice with its other investments. Just yesterday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Softbank was in talks to invest in Alibaba’s Ele.me food delivery service in China. In March of this year, Softbank led DoorDash’s $535 million Series D round, and the company also owns a 15 percent stake in Uber, whose Uber Eats food delivery is growing like crazy.

From Zume’s perspective, the Softbank investment would obviously strap a booster rocket on its growth. Zume has been very methodical in its growth so far, expanding its pizza delivery only in the Bay Area. That type of cash would fund geographic expansion as well as give it the runway to broaden into new cuisines.

We’ve reached out to Zume for confirmation and will update this post when we hear back. UPDATE: Zume replied to us with a “no comment at this time.”

Zume to Open it’s Mobile Cooking Platform to any Restaurant

When Zume first came on the scene, a lot of people got hooked on its pizza-making robot. But what was always more intriguing to us here at The Spoon was Zume as a data and logistics platform.

Zume takes into consideration hundreds of data points, such as day of the week, weather, school calendars and more to develop predictions around how much pizza and what types of pizza will be ordered in a given location. From there a food delivery vehicle cooks up the pizza on the move and delivers it with precise timing.

Now Zume wants to license out that know-how, as today it announced a plan to open up its platform to any restaurant that wants to replicate Zume’s logistical and technical expertise. To help facilitate the cooking needs of these third-party implementations, Zume also announced that it has partnered with commercial foodservice equipment maker, Welbilt, to incorporate custom built, hyper-efficient appliances into the next generation of Zume’s customizeable food delivery vehicles.

“It’s all well and good to do pizza,” said Alex Garden, Co-Founder and CEO of Zume in a phone interview. “The truth is that we’ve developed a tech stack that will allow any restaurant to power the next generation of their business.”

The company was light on details, saying that today’s announcement is meant to spark discussions with potential customers. At first, Zume will be more like a consultancy, which works with clients individually to establish their goals and plan out an appropriate technical and vehicular solution. From there it will determine the next best steps and and offer a catalog of Welbilt appliances (steamers, griddles, broilers, etc.) that will work best in any food delivery vehicle.

Garden wouldn’t say exactly what kinds of customers Zume was targeting, but indicated that restaurants that are already at scale and feeling pressures from high wage costs, rent costs, or delivery systems digging too deeply into its margins would be a good fit.

It sounds like Zume is doing what Eatsa did towards the end of last year when it decided to pull back from running its own establishments in favor of helping other restaurants automate their businesses. Unlike Eatsa, however, Zume, which has raised $96 million in funding, is expanding its footprint instead of shrinking. As part of today’s announcement, Zume said it’s adding 26 new delivery locations around the Bay Area by the end of this year, and will completely cover the Bay Area by the end of 2019.

Given the methodical rate at which it’s expanding, powering other restaurants is a less capital-intensive way to reach a national scale. In addition to another line of revenue for the company, partnering with other restaurants would also give Zume access to lots of new geographic, customer and cuisine data sets. These new data sets could expand and improve Zume’s predictive algorithms which should, in turn, boost sales for partner restaurants and help Zume should it decide to broaden the types of food it serves.

Depending on what Zume ends up charging (and the data they demand), it’s easy to see why this could be a welcome partnership for restaurants. As delivery services like Uber Eats and DoorDash take off, more people are choosing to eat from home rather than sit in a restaurant. That’s a lot of square footage that can go unused at a restaurant, and a lot of commissions paid out to those delivery services, which eats into margins.

Additionally, hooking up with Zume would allow a restaurant to better control its own delivery destiny and better protect their brand. Instead of some indifferent third party bringing soggy fries to your door, a restaurant could take advantage of Zume’s cook on the way tech to ensure that the food arrives hot and fresh.

But it’s not all just about third parties and platforms for Zume. There’s still cool stuff like robots, and those next-gen food delivery vehicles, which come with six high-efficiency ovens that can make 120 pizzas in an hour. Now we’ll just have to see how many restaurants climb aboard.

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.

Is Robotics The Next Hot Sector For Food Tech Investment?

If you spend any time analyzing the food tech investment landscape, you notice something pretty quickly: the vast majority of funding goes to food delivery.

And while food delivery will continue to be the biggest slice of the investment pie for the foreseeable future, recently there’s been a noticeable uptick in non-delivery related food tech investments.

One area outside of delivery that is piquing the interest of investors is food robotics. In the last year, we’ve seen numerous investments in both professional and consumer focused food robotics.

A few examples from 2016:

Otto Robotics: The Seattle area startup recently raised $1.5 million for its food assembly robot for restaurants.  The company, which is still in stealth, raised its funding from Paul Allen’s Vulcan Ventures and Draper Associates.

Casabots: This company which makes salad assembly robot for cafeterias and restaurants picked up a $100 thousand in spring of 2016. The company is planning on producing its salad robot at scale in 2017.

Zume Pizza: This ambitious startup wants to not only make pizzas using robotics, but also puts them to use in its delivery trucks to help bring fresh pizza to your home. They raised an impressive $23 million late last year.

Drink Robots: Robotic cocktail startups Bartesian and Somabar both recently picked up funding, with Somabar receiving a $1.5 million and Bartesian getting an undisclosed amount from Beam Suntory, the spirits company behind Jim Beam whiskey brand. Early this year pro-cocktail robot company Monsieur picked up $1.2 million.

Gammachef: This Croatian maker of consumer cooking robots is still developing its first product, but Podravka, one of Croatia’s largest and oldest packaged food companies, made news in the country by making Gammachef its first startup investment.

Why all the interest in robots? In the professional markets like back of house food assembly, it’s clear that this technology could help automate repeatable, high-volume tasks such as making a pizza or preparing a hamburger. While automating (and eliminating) jobs with robotics may not be something large restaurant chains want to discuss publicly in today’s political environment, there is no doubt food is an industry that will see a large-scale injection of robotic technology over the next decade.

Consumer food robotics offer a less sure path for investors, mostly because robots excel at tasks that are high-volume and repeatable. Unless you’re planning on feeding your neighbors every day or drinking 30 cocktails after a hard day at work, chances are you don’t need a robot. Still, over time product categories like multicookers (i.e. Thermomix) will incorporate more automation and startups like Gammachef will continue to work on making food assembly in the home easier. At some point, I expect someone to create a compelling and affordable cooking robot that that captures the imagination (and dollars) of consumers.

Will food robotics ever rival delivery as an investment category? Probably not anytime soon. However, just as food delivery was seen as ripe for disruption by the investor class, I think food assembly and creation is now very much on investors’ radar and will take a bigger piece of the pie in coming years.

The Year In Food Robots

When you hear the words ‘food’ and ‘robot’ in the same sentence, chances are something like Softbank’s Pepper pops to mind, a modern Rosie-the-robot like humanoid with the hands and feet required to move around a kitchen and flip a pancake or two.

But when it comes to the kitchen, reality hasn’t quite caught up with the world envisioned by Hanna-Barbera, at least not yet. While there are companies who seem pretty serious about creating human-like creatures to take over our kitchen, the kitchen robot invasion, at least for the foreseeable future, will most likely consist of many more single-function machines that can automate tasks like drink mixing or stirring food in a pot rather than machines that act as a humanoid master chef (with one or two exceptions).

There’s also a big difference between what’s happening in the consumer kitchen compared to the pro kitchen.  While consumers will witness a slow and subtle invasion of single-purpose devices into our homes, in the pro kitchen we’re likely to see a variety of robotic systems put into use in restaurant environments over the next few years.

Below we take a look at what happened in food robots in 2016 and what to expect in 2017:

Consumer Cooking Robots in 2016: Failure To Boot

When it comes to consumer multifunction cooking robots, 2016 was mostly a non-starter. Despite showing at this year’s CES, Sereneti never shipped their product. OneCook, coming off a high-profile Kickstarter campaign in 2015 in which they raised over $100 thousand, missed its August ship date and has paused production without an update in months.

If you really want the closest thing to an all-in-one cooking robot today, your best bet is something like the Thermomix, a multi-cooker that I’ve been trying out and have discovered it does a whole lot of things and does them well. Sure, it may not have robotic arms to peel garlic or slice potatoes, but did you think you could automate everything in the kitchen?

Bartenderbots

If after a crazy year you feel you could use a drink, here’s some good news: the bartenderbots are coming.

Two startups, Bartesian and Somabar, are both in the process of bringing drink mixers to market that automate the process of making a cocktail.  Both use chambers to hold spirits, while the Bartesian uses a pod-based system to add flavors a la Keurig, while the Somabar has an infuser chamber to hold flavors that are added to the drink in the mixing process.

Both have told The Spoon they are planning to ship in first half of 2017.

Breadbots 

If drinking isn’t your thing, perhaps you’d like a breadbot.

The Rotimatic, a robot that makes roti (Indian flatbread) and wraps began shipping in August. The wrap-robot is made by Zimplistic, a Singapore based startup that first showed off the product in January 2015 at CES. The company is working towards shipping the product to the US in 2017.

Another automated breadmaker, the Flatev, launched their Kickstarter campaign for a pod-based tortilla maker in May and indicated this month they are on track for an August 2017 ship date.

Ok, So Maybe We Do Have A Chefbot: Moley

If you’ve seen a story about a full kitchen robot in 2016, chances are it was about Moley. The startup, which touts itself as makers of the first robotic kitchen, has created a prototype of robotic chef that uses two fully robotic arms to mimic the movements of BBC master chef Tim Anderson.  While Moley appears to be the kind of robot that would work well in a pro kitchen, particularly if it was surrounded by a supporting cast of sous chefs to prepare ingredients (the Moley robot only prepares the final meal, but doesn’t do prep work or cleanup), the company envisions a consumer version of the Moley robot complete with two robotic arms, a built-in oven, a cooktop and a touchscreen to control the system.

While the idea of a fully robotic cooking robot is intriguing, I have my doubts about the readiness of the concept for consumer kitchens in 2017. Partly for practical considerations, as the Moley robot will require a large footprint, will require professional installation and, at this point, only performs part of the cooking process.  My biggest concern, however, is cost: while the company has yet to release pricing, I suspect it will cost somewhere north of five thousand (maybe much more) given it has a built in cooktop, stove and, oh yeah, robotic arms. All of this built-in tech means only those willing to spends lots of money on a futuristic concept will buy a Moley, provided it works well (and that’s a big if).

Despite these concerns, I am excited for the work Moley is doing, even though I’m not convinced the consumer market is ready for the product just yet.

You can see the Moley prototype at work below:

The robotic chef - Moley Robotics

Here Come The Probots

While the consumer cooking robotics market has surprisingly bare shelves in late 2016, the pro kitchen saw significant progress in 2016. There are a number of different ‘probots’ being developed for the restaurant and professional kitchen. Below are a few of the food (p)robot innovators we watched closely in 2016:

Casabots

Casabots is a salad assembly robot company that began in 2014 after founder and CEO Deepak Sekar had experimented with creating a food robot for his home. He soon realized that a more practical application of robotics was in professional environments and, before long, Sally was born. Sally, the company’s salad-assembly robot, looks a little (or a lot) like a refrigerator and allows the user to pick their ingredients using a touchscreen. Sekar told me that they are working with corporations like Aramark that run cafeterias to have Sally installed in high-volume work environments and expects to have Sally ready for market in early 2017.

Momentum Machines

Back in 2012, a new company emerged from food tech startup incubator Lemnos Labs with the goal of not helping humans in the world of fast food, but replacing them all together.

“Our device isn’t meant to make employees more efficient,” said Momentum Machines co-founder Alexandros Vardakostas in an interview with Xconomy. “It’s meant to completely obviate them.”

A couple of years later, the company unveiled a prototype of a machine that could make up to 400 hamburgers per hour. The device, the tech details of which the company has kept largely under wraps, is described in the diagram below:

momentummachines-0

What’s fascinating about Momentum Machines technology is that while it works at industrial speed, it’s not mass producing the same burger over and over. It’s creating up to 400 custom burgers per hour. That’s right: up to 400 uniquely crafted, cooked, assembled and bagged hamburgers per hour.

And now, after going silent since 2014, the company created a buzz in June when it was discovered they’d applied for a building permit to create its first restaurant in San Francisco. While the roboburger joint has yet to open, we’re excited to head there in 2017 to try out a fully robot-produced hamburger.

Zume Pizza

The craziest – and perhaps most brilliant  – of all the pro food robots is from Zume Pizza. Founded by former Zynga President Alex Garden, Zume utilizes robotics in two points in the process (production and distribution) to get fresh machine-assisted artisan-style pizzas to consumers.

The pizza production process utilizes three robots and a conveyor belt system to produce pizzas at a fast rate for consumption in-restaurant or delivered to the home. The process includes three robots for production (Pepe for sauce dispensing, Marta for sauce spreading, and Bruno for loading and unloading pizza into the oven).  Humans work side-by-side in the Zume pizza kitchen, adding ingredients to the pizza, correcting any errors by the robots.

If you think the robot’s job done at Zume once it comes out of the kitchen, you’d be wrong. The company is working on creating large pizza trucks that utilize what it calls “Baking on the way” technology, a patented system that employs 56 individual ovens that are wired to initiate a cook just minutes before the arrival at the consumer’s door to give them an “out of the oven” experience.

The company, which opened its first restaurant this year, has applied for permits to operate its mobile pizza ovens on wheels and just this month raised close to $23 million in equity financing, so there’s a good chance we’ll see more restaurants – and possibly some pizza ovens on wheels – from Zume in 2017.

Starship 

While Starship isn’t really a food robot, there’s a good chance it’s robots – or ones like it – will help bring food to us in the future. That’s because Starship, a company cofounded by Skype cofounder Ahti Heinla, makes sidewalk delivery robots that are already being put into trials by large grocery stores to deliver food to consumers.

When I spoke to Heinla earlier this year, he made it clear he thought robotic delivery had huge advantages over the traditional method of humans and cars.

“With robots,” he said, ”the cost is in technology, manufacturing, and maintenance. The safest bet you can do is that technology is getting cheaper all the time. It’s just a question of time before this (delivery) will be one dollar, fifty cents.”

What’s interesting is Starship robots still require humans to control them – much like today’s drones – in the process of a delivery. Heinla envisions a human remotely controlling up to 10 or so Starship sidewalk delivery robots at some point, but unlike cars or even drones, what makes these robots ready for delivery deployment today is how slow they move.

“With a sidewalk robot, when a robot encounters a situation that is too complicated for the automatic system to handle, the robot can simply stop on the sidewalk and call up the (human) operator to help. This is the beauty of using a robot moving at pedestrian speeds on a sidewalk.”

Looking Forward

2016 saw significant advancement in food and cooking robotics. While the professional kitchen is further along in the food robot revolution in part because efforts to add robotics to centralized and professional food production facilities have excited for decades, we think 2017 could be an exciting year for the consumer market too as Moley, bartenderbots and even cooking robots like Sereneti finally make their debut. Investor interest in both sectors seems to be rising, so we also expect some new companies to debut in 2017 and beyond that bring robotics to the kitchen.

Lastly, there is a whole bunch of innovation going on in cooking automation and food 3D printing, areas which often overlap with kitchen robotics (take the pancakebot, for example). We expect those areas to be equally exciting in 2017.

Stay tuned and check back here at The Spoon as we cover the food robot revolution – and more – in 2017.