Zume, a tech company most people have probably never heard of — but that was once worth nearly half a billion dollars — is officially dead. The company, which wanted to use robots, data collection, and high tech culinary innovation to disrupt the pizza delivery business, is officially insolvent and is currently in the process of liquidating its assets, The Information has reported.
Founded in 2015 in Mountain View, Calif., the idea behind Zume was to automate pizza production and delivery using a bevy of trendy Silicon Valley innovations. And while that might seem like an intriguing idea, Zume’s business model was so hilarious as to seem plucked straight from a Futurama episode.
To start, Zume pies would be assembled at breakneck speed at the company’s headquarters by industrial robot arms; then, the uncooked dough and cheese would be transferred to what the company called “mobile kitchens” — food delivery trucks outfitted with hi-tech ovens that were supposed to cook the pizzas en route to customers’ houses. Orders could be placed using the company’s delivery app and then a nearby Zume truck would hurry to the app user’s location. The trucks were reportedly outfitted with GPS-equipped ovens that could ensure that pizzas were ready by the time the vehicle was within close physical proximity to the customer. Data collection and artificial intelligence, meanwhile, was allegedly used by Zume to anticipate consumer choices for the pizzas they were buying.
Zume created enough buzz that, within several years of its founding, the business had generated a gargantuan amount of venture capital funding. Most notably, the company enjoyed a generous infusion from Japanese investment firm SoftBank, which gifted the startup a whopping $US375 million in 2018. By the end of its lifespan, Zume raised as much as $US445 million.
Despite its overflowing war chest, however, Zume’s business suffered from a critical flaw: it’s apparently quite difficult to cook a pizza while it’s in the back of a moving vehicle — even when robots and advanced technology are involved. When you think about it, this problem would appear to be self-evident, especially given the company’s location in the Bay Area (can you imagine cooking anything while simultaneously hurtling down one of San Francisco’s death-defying hills?). So, despite Zume’s best efforts to stabilise its mobile culinary enterprise, cheese reportedly kept flying off its pies mid-journey — making it a less than savoury proposition for many buyers. A couple years ago, Bloomberg reported on Zume’s troubles, noting the difficulty of keeping pies from disintegrating while they were en route:
Eventually…[the] team gave up on the dream of baking the pies while driving to customers, according to two people familiar with the matter. The cheese tended to run everywhere as the trucks turned or hit bumps in the road. Instead, the oven trucks began parking in central locations, with runner cars or mopeds transporting the cooked pies.
After a spiraling decline, Zume shuttered its pizza-making division in 2020 — a move that led to layoffs for several hundred people and reduced its workforce by approximately 50 per cent. The company then pivoted to something fairly different: selling “sustainable [food] packaging.” Back in 2019, Zume had purchased a company appropriately called Pivot Packaging, which made food containers from materials that could be composted — like bamboo and wheat. After the death of its pizza division, Zume pivoted to selling these kinds of containers full time.
In other words, after having wasted an ungodly amount of money trying to make pizza in the most complicated way possible, Zume decided that the best course of action was to just try selling boxes instead. Now, several years later, having failed at that, the company has retained an investment management firm to sell off its remaining assets while its former executives find something else to do.
While it seems only natural that such an epic downfall would shatter Silicon Valley’s faith in robot pizza as a bankable concept, that is not the case. Though Zume may be dead, a different startup — this one founded by a former SpaceX engineer — is currently trying to succeed where it failed. Stellar Pizza Inc. recently enjoyed a $US16. 5 million contribution from Marcy Venture Partners — Jay-Z’s venture capital firm — and, in March, the company rolled out its cheesy products at a college campus in Los Angeles. So, who knows? Maybe Stellar will succeed in conquering that most formidable of entrepreneurial peaks and finally bring us the automated pizza nobody asked for.