The video gave me the impression of a kitchen designed by a chef or line cook, with a manufacturing robot tossed in there. If the goal was automated centralized production, any competent manufacturing engineer would have designed a radically simpler setup. Of course, finding machinery that didn't have a production capacity too far beyond Zume's needs would probably have been a challenge. Hundreds of pizzas an hour--let alone thousands--is well beyond anything Zume could have handled, because their biggest bottleneck would have always been delivery.
> Lets talk a minute about their "mobile ovens". WTH do they need 56 ovens for? It seems like assembly still has to happen at a "hub", but how many pizzas do you really need to bake on the way? Maybe a max of 10 for huge orders?
The entire concept is a bit wacky. You don't need to bake the pizza entirely on the way; just scale up how New York pizzerias handle pizza by the slice.[0] A plain pizza gets half-baked and when a customer orders a slice, toppings are added and it's put in the oven for a couple minutes until fully cooked. Prepping whole pizzas at a central kitchen and then putting them in a delivery van that finishes cooking the pizzas is something I could maybe see being viable with minimal investment. A very hesitant maybe.
But there are no robots and no wizards (er, machine learning some of Zume's early coverage discussed) for that kind of business. And that probably means no big investments as there are some articles where I can't help but substitute "magic" or "wizards" for certain words and think "yeah, that's probably closer to what some investors or journalists heard."
0. https://www.seriouseats.com/2018/10/new-york-pizza-slice-his...
And didn't bother to do a simple Youtube search, watch one of the "how it's done" programs on TV, or talk to someone in the industry.
Being a little bit more active in my local start-up scene now also means following stat-ups in general. And a lot of these companies, including one I used to work for for a short period, seem to ignore lessons other learned, the hard way. If these lessons are concerning your USP, ignore them, because it is where you inovate. regardless, you should have understood these lessons before ignoring them.
Ignoring these lessons in any other part of your company is just stupid. Like not managing your cash flow.
I have to believe they bought it with the idea of doing much much more but hadn't figured out how.
Overall, it seems they knew they wanted to "automate pizza" but really had no idea how. Another comment shows a real pizza assembly line that looks both simple and efficient.
Lets talk a minute about their "mobile ovens". WTH do they need 56 ovens for? It seems like assembly still has to happen at a "hub", but how many pizzas do you really need to bake on the way? Maybe a max of 10 for huge orders?
> Serious question: would this investment have been awarded if the cofounder weren't a minority female?
Lets not go there.