LinkedIn members are contacting me about Zume. For those of you who don’t know who Zume was, the company was founded in 2015, with the goal of using robots to make pizzas and cook them inside specially designed vans with ovens.
I was an advisor to the founder of the company for two years, Alex Garden. There is a lot of false information about Zume on LinkedIn and in the media so allow me to clear up a few misconceptions:
1. A robot was used to prepare pizzas for cooking – putting on the sauce, spreading the sauce, adding and spreading the cheese, and adding toppings.
2. The pizzas were loaded into Italian double ovens and half-cooked, then placed into a 50-stack oven (not Italian) that was rolled into the van and connected to power and software.
3. The vans were dispatched with 50 pizzas. When an order for a pizza was placed, software identified the location of the customer and the exact drive time to reach the customer. A pizza was then placed inside an oven. The software would fire up the oven to begin the cooking process so that as the van arrived at the customer, the cooking process would end. This allowed customers to receive a hot fresh pizza.
4. Contrary to comments by the media or what I’ve read on LinkedIn, Zume did in fact cook the pizzas inside Zume’s vans. 100% of the cooking could be done in the vans.
Zume encountered many issues due to the ovens not working properly and the robot kept breaking down. There were too many disparate systems and a lack of experience. There was a lack of focus from the CEO even though Zume raised $445M from investors. For reasons I can’t explain, the CEO took an interest in racing cars and stopped communicating. Alex was under a lot pressure.
Justin Frankert can confirm the above as he is the person who designed the process and he personally built the line and programmed the robots. Justin is brilliant.
I must also point out that cooking pizza wasn’t the goal of the company. I made the argument that the way for Zume to be a disruptor and a multi-billion dollar company was by doing the following:
1. Be able to cook meals such as steak, chicken, fish, baked potatoes, vegetables, Mexican food, Italian, and so on.
2. Introduce highly efficient commercial commissaries for food prep and cooking. Minimize cooking in the vans.
3. My primary goal was this: cook and deliver meals at a price point cheaper than customers can shop for groceries and cook the meals themselves. Note: This is the strategy I have recommended to Amazon vs. going head-to-head against the leading grocery retailers. If Amazon (or Starbucks) does this…wow!
Zume also wanted to reimagine the fresh fruits and vegetables supply chain by building massive Giga Farms that used vertical and hydroponic farming techniques. I was against the idea due to the capital requirements. I urged Zume to focus on the tech, software and the vans. Perfect one thing and scale.
RIP Zume.
