Pizza trucks that bake on the way to be licensed.
What the world needs now are trucks that can cook food en route to customers’ homes so it arrives piping hot.
That’s the view of Mountain View’s Zume Pizza. Armed with dozens of patents, the startup has been honing its baked-on-the-way method since 2016 with a pizza delivery operation in Silicon Valley. It also has robots make the pies, but it says the trucks are a bigger breakthrough.
“The truck is a fully deployed kitchen,” said Zume CEO and cofounder Alex Garden. The company can load inventory onto the trucks, and “because we cook at the last minute, we don’t need chemicals and preservatives,” he said. “Our inventory model lets us buy the finest ingredients.” Now Zume said it has perfected the technology enough to license the mobile kitchens to other restaurants for food beyond pizza, an idea it is hyping to the skies.
“It’s similar to how Apple fundamentally changed the way third-parties build on its platform when they made the leap to the second gen iPhone and introduced the App Store,” Zume’s press materials state.
While that claim is hyperbolic, food delivery is a multibillion-dollar market; pizza alone is $40 billion annually. Biting off even a small slice of that could yield big benefits.
Zume is partnering with Welbilt, a giant of commercial food-service equipment, so its appliances will work in Zume trucks. “Every quick service/fast casual restaurant is now compatible with the Zume format,” Garden said. “The company is moving from being pizza to being a platform.”
The 29-foot bright-red trucks are the size of a FedEx delivery vehicle. The onboard kitchens, which include ovens, refrigerators, compressed air, water and electricity, are powered by a diesel generator underneath the truck, which is also where a water tank resides.
Garden said Zume has drawn interest from “a surprising range” of restaurants and chains but declined to identify any.
“The idea of in-transit ovens is differentiated and unique,” said Michael Wolf, founder of the Smart Kitchen Summit, events about the future of food and cooking. “They can look at advanced data analytics and take cooking to where the end-user demand is. If they know there’s an event at the stadium on Thursday, they can move the distribution point and cooking to there.”
Of course, the humble food truck can do the same thing, but Wolf said Zume’s technology for predicting demand and ensuring that food is fresh take the concept further.
With the explosion of online ordering through apps such as UberEats, DoorDash, Postmates and others, many quick-service restaurants have seen business decline, Wolf said.
“If this helps fast-casual get more into food delivery and potentially own it, that would be big,” he said. It could also be part of the trend toward kitchen-only locations that prepare food for customer pickup and delivery, Wolf said.
Zume is mum about what restaurants would pay for the trucks, which already have been through several iterations. Zume started with 56 ovens per truck, then scaled down to 28 and now has six. It says that’s enough to bake 120 pizzas an hour. The company has 170 workers, both employees and hourly independent contractors. It would not disclose funding, but Crunchbase pegs its backing at $96 million.
The trucks don’t always do the deliveries; sometimes they park on a street to cook, and couriers on scooters, cars and bikes dart in to pick up orders.
Zume, which started with deliveries around its Mountain View headquarters, including Los Altos and Palo Alto, has now added Cupertino and Sunnyvale, with other Peninsula locations to come soon. By the end of this year, it hopes to operate in 26 Bay Area markets, covering the Peninsula, South Bay and East Bay. San Francisco is on tap for 2019, Garden said.
Zume’s claims about its pizza’s superior freshness and taste are not entirely reflected in its Yelp reviews. It has 3.5 stars out of a potential five. Even positive reviews call the delivery “hit or miss,” and comments on the taste are mixed.
Garden attributed the poor feedback to Zume’s experimentation in tweaking its approach. “We didn’t always get it right; there’s a full range of things that can go wrong, and we learn from our mistakes,” he said.
Fernando Cabildo, a graduate student in Palo Alto, said he and his partner have ordered from Zume a few times over the past few months, and he likes the pizza.
“It looks really pretty; it comes in a really nice little box, and it’s fresh and warm,” he said.
Still, when he recently ordered a $30, eight-slice Zume pizza for some workers, “They liked it but couldn’t tell the difference” from other types of pizza, he said.
Carolyn Said is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: csaid@ sfchronicle.com Twitter: @csaid