ROBOTS TAKE SLICE OF PIZZA BIZ PIE
Company says machines cut costs, work faster, help take on rivals
Not long after Zume Pizza opened for business last year, its kitchen staff noticed a problem with some of its pizzas: They had holes in them.
It wasn’t the fault of the workers, who rolled out intact dough bases. Therewasn’t a kitchen mole prodding holes. It wasn’t even the recipe — a Zume pizza base can handle its fair share of toppings. It was the robots.
Josh Goldberg, 38, is the chief technology officer of the Mountain View, Calif., pizza joint. Although most pizzerias don’t have an engineering staff, let alone a CTO, Zume prides itself on automation to make operations more efficient.
It estimates its kitchen canmake 10times more pizzas than a pizzeria with a comparable staff. It has a robot that squirts tomato sauce onto its pies. It has a robot that spreads the sauce, mimicking the movements of Zume’s head chef. There’s a robot arm (similar to those found in auto manufacturing facilities) that puts the pie in the oven. And, as of thismonth, there’s a robot that presses the dough into a perfect circle.
So if the company has a non-human problem, it’s Goldberg’s problem.
Observing operations in the company’s lab-like kitchen, Goldberg watched as the human cooks spun glossy blobs of dough and placed them on the conveyor belt. He watched as a camera hovering above snapped a photo of the dough so it could inform the other robots of the pizza’s size, shapeandprecise location. Anothercamera detected the center of the pie and instructed a nozzle to squirt sauce, and a delta robot — the kind used on assembly lines — used a spiral movement to spread it. Humans topped the pizza with pepperoni, fresh basil and cheese.
And just as the pizzawas about to be put into the oven, Goldberg found the problem.
There was a small gap between two conveyor belts. If both kept moving, then the pizza would glide along without any problems. But if the conveyor belts stopped for as little as two seconds, part of the pizza would sink into the gap, creating a tear when the machines started up again.
Fixing the problem was easy enough. Goldberg just had to program the conveyor belt to not stop when a pizza was passing over the gap. But there are always new problems. Robots need calibrating, codeneeds to be updated. Whenever there’s a change in the dough or sauce recipe, the robots must be taught new ways to work with different textures and consistencies.
That’s why Zume has a team of 20 software engineers. And its 20-person kitchen staff doesn’t just prep ingredients; many have been trained to work with the robots. Its entire culinary team uses project management tools typically used by software engineers at tech companies for managing projects and fixing bugs.
“We have fewer people, butwe pay them much higher rates with full benefits as opposed to having a proliferation of lowerskilled workers,” said Julia Collins, Zume’s co-founder and co-chief executive.
The goal isn’t end-to-end automation, Collins said. There are still things that humans do better than machines, such as prepping ingredients, making sauce, developing recipes and knowing when something isn’t right with a pie. But automation and software enablesZumeto reduce costs, make more pizzas, predict what pizzas people want before they order them and, eventually, take on the big pizza chains.
At least that’s what investors are betting. They’ve put more than $23million into the company.
To expand its operations, the company says it will need only a single new robot-equipped kitchen in each new metropolitan market, relying on its fleet of oven-equipped trucks, each with the capacity tobakeanddelivermore than200pizzas aday.
If it succeeds, it has the potential to eliminate lots of repetitive jobs. The restaurant industry is projected to employ 14.7 million people in 2017 — about 1 in 10 working Americans — according to the National Restaurant Association.
Joe Pawlak, managing principal at market research firm Technomic, says it’s more likely that robots will alter restaurant jobs than erase them. “Automation will change the complexion of theworkforcemore than it drastically changes numbers,” he said.
That’s because many diners want food that’s made with care— not on an assembly line, he said. Pawlak believes the restaurant industry workforce could grow more sophisticated as robots pick up some of the more repetitive jobs.
Goldberg got his start in electrical engineering in the 1990s before making the switch to software development. He worked at an e-publishing company at one point, spent nearly a decade developing software and systems for online dating sites, and has run his own web-hosting business on the side. His last food service industry job was 23 years ago when he worked in a bagel shop.
“WhenI told people Iwas leavingmy old job and going to make pizza, they thought I was joking,” he said.