When in 2015 the CEO of Zume, Alex Garden, promised to "automate everything" in the world of pizza thanks to robots and artificial intelligence, investors believed they had found the new frontier of food delivery. It's a shame that Zume's dreams of glory were soon shattered by technological limitations and managerial incompetence: today the company failed after burning through $445 million. His lesson is precious.
The ambitious business idea
Zume's innovative idea was born in 2013, when Alex Garden filed a patent for a system of cooking food during delivery. The concept was revolutionary: using vans equipped as mobile restaurants to cook pizzas just minutes from the customer, guaranteeing freshness and quality.
in 2015, Garden founded Zume Pizza together with Julia Collins, combining his technological vision with Collins' food industry expertise. This combination seemed promising, with the aim of reinventing the way we cook and deliver quality food.
The bet on advanced automation
Garden is obsessed with automation: he wants to replace manual preparation with robotic arms that spread sauce and roll out dough. The first tests work. The first.
Despite the initial innovation, however, Zume faces significant technological obstacles. Garden's goal of automating pizza preparation using robotic arms that spread sauce and rolled out dough is beset by notable and unanticipated practical problems. The vans prove problematic, the cheese slides off the pizza due to the slope, and the robots frequently break down. Practical snags that highlight the challenges of implementing high-tech technology into a complex and variable activity like cooking.
But Zume is now looking beyond pizza: it wants to become "the Amazon of food", reinventing every aspect of the supply chain.
And how did it go "beyond the pizza"?
Since 2018, Zuma begins to branch away from pizza production, aiming to become an automated food truck platform under the broader Zume, Inc. umbrella.
The company begins licensing its automation technology and begins selling food packaging, holding patents for sustainable food delivery boxes. In November 2018, Zume raised $375 million from SoftBank, reaching a valuation of $2,25 billion.
More than pizza, right? in 2019 buys Pivot, a plant-based packaging company that focuses on automated manufacturing and packaging for other food companies. It plans to build a 6500-square-meter (70.000-square-foot) manufacturing facility in Southern California to launch Zume Packaging.
in 2020, Zume is selling its pizza technology (who knows how far along it will be now), and laying off a lot of the staff. The truth? Garden's infinite ideas have no commercial success. Costs rise and "innovations" reveal concrete limits. Covid takes its toll.
Today Zume closes its doors with little fanfare. The pizza turned out like crap, all burnt. With her, half a billion dollars was also wasted between wealthy investors and hopeful believers in technology as a panacea for all ills.
Even the pizza “s'adda sapè fa”
It is necessary to study cases like these very carefully (a bit like those of Theranos o FTX), because they are paradigmatic. As often happens, the founders continued their careers in other projects, but this failure leaves open questions about Silicon Valley's degree of understanding of traditional sectors that it is trying to "revolutionize" with high-tech.
The Zume case seems to demonstrate the risks of applying technological solutions to complex areas such as catering without fully understanding their dynamics and needs. Do we perhaps need more humility and connection with the real world? Meditate, people. Meditate.
And make yourself a nice Margherita, a Neapolitan tells you.
