When a foodie has a craving for pizza, they are often faced with two problems: either the cheese sticks to the top of the box because the delivery guy is a bit too reckless, or they are forced to eat plastic-tasting ingredients thanks to the preservatives in frozen options.
But now the company Zume Pizza is making sure that consumers get fresh pizza delivered to their doorsteps with its first-of-its-kind food delivery vehicle - and a little help from robots.
Former Shake Shack restaurateur Julia Collins and former general manager of Xbox Live Alex Garden teamed up to create Zume Pizza and its food delivery vehicle, which is equipped with a 50KW generator, its new tech that features 56 pizza ovens and a self-cleaning pizza cutter that divides the pizza into eight even slices.
What the vehicle is not is a food truck. It doesn't have a service window, sink or other features that are found on stationary food trucks. But the vehicle still brings the convenience of food delivery without sacrificing on having high-quality ingredients.
"At Zume Pizza, our goal is to deliver the best preservative-free, locally-sourced pizza that's accessible to as many people as possible, regardless of time or budget," Collins, co-founder and co-CEO of Zume Pizza told Tech Times. "Plus, since pizza is America's favorite delivery food, we're not having to create any type of new consumer behavior. Americans eat $40 billion of pizza a year, and we'd love to take a 'slice' out of that market."
And to be able to provide customers with fresh, never frozen, artisan pizza at an affordable price (a 14-inch pizza ranges from $15-$19 with no delivery fee and tip included), Zume Pizza uses robots to help deliver on this promise.
Once a customer places an order, a team of humans and the company's robots work together in the company's central kitchen located in Mountain View, California to start the baking process using an 800-degree oven.
It's with the help of the robots that pizzas are able to be made both faster and with better ingredients.
"Zume garners the power of its dynamic robots to automate the pizza production process, which makes our pizza production line faster, safer and twice as cost-efficient as the typical delivery pizza operation," Collins added. "Our proprietary pizza-making robots, also referred to as 'P-Bos,' automate unsafe, repetitive tasks associated with food preparation (ask any pizza chef about the number of burns on his or her arms!) so that we can invest in more high-quality, locally sourced ingredients."
The pie is then moved to the mobile pizza lab (the Food Delivery Vehicle), which is equipped with its patented "Baked On The Way (BOTW)" technology. The tech consists of 56 ovens, which eliminates what is called the pizza's dwell time, the time it spends outside the oven while out for delivery. Since the pizza continues baking while en route, consumers are able to devour hot, farm-fresh pizza upon arrival.
This also means that the pizza can be made with half the amount of fat and 40 percent fewer calories since fresh, local and seasonal ingredients are used, without the use of chemicals for extended shelf life.
"We're starting with pizza, but the implications for BOTW technology extends to the entire food delivery industry. It reduces the need to use artificial ingredients to preserve 'freshness,'" Garden said in a press release. "By eliminating dwell time, we can make pizza with locally sourced, chemical-free ingredients, so that customers don't have to compromise quality for convenience."
Zume Pizza's Food Delivery Vehicle launches today in California. Customers can ditch soggy pizza deliveries and opt for the robot-made option by checking out ZumePizza.com or downloading the app for iOS and Android.
Collins revealed that the company will expand to open two locations in the South Bay by the end of the year.
