Zume Pizza already made a name for themselves by converting their delivery vehicles to bake pizzas during delivery, and now they’re taking their disruptive business model one step further by building robots that make pizza.
Partnering with AAB Robotics, Zume’s partially-automated kitchen uses robot labor for specific tasks that suffer from human error (like spreading sauce evenly), while still retaining a human workforce to shape dough and dress pies with cheese and toppings.
Robots also take and process incoming orders using artificial intelligence. “Pizza ordering is incredibly predictable,” Zume co-founder Julia Collins told KPIX, by way of explanation. “Most of our customers order according to a rather habitual sort of method. So, what we can do is use artificial intelligence and machine learning to predict what orders are going to be available for us to fulfill.”
Zume plans to have 80% of their kitchen automated by March 2017, and is currently working on shaving their delivery time down to five minutes. They also claim that high levels of automation will lower prices, but so far that hasn’t happened yet; a Zume large pizza costs between $1 and $4 more than a large from Domino’s.
Scroll down for a TechCrunch video about Zume’s automated kitchen and ordering process.
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