Zume

» see zume.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Zume started in 2015 in Mountain View as Zume Pizza, founded by Alex Garden and Julia Collins. The pitch was that delivery pizza is bad because of the gap between the oven and your door, and the fix was to close that gap by putting the oven in the van. Robot arms at the depot would press the dough and lay the sauce, a human would finish the toppings, and then fifty six small ovens bolted into a delivery truck would bake the pies on the road, timed by GPS so each one came out of the oven a few streets from the customer.

The money arrived in a specific order. Six million dollars in 2016, with Jerry Yang among the investors. Forty eight million more in the fall of 2017. Then on 2 November 2018, SoftBank put in three hundred and seventy five million dollars at a valuation of $2.25 billion, which took the total raised to roughly four hundred and forty five million. Almost none of that was spent on pizza. By the time the SoftBank money landed, Zume was already describing itself as a kitchen technology platform rather than a restaurant.

In January 2020 it cut more than five hundred jobs and shut the robotics and delivery truck operations entirely. What was left pivoted to compostable food packaging, built on Pivot Packaging, which Zume had bought in 2019 for $20.5 million. That business ran into its own problem: the molded fiber containers contained PFAS, which meant they could not legally be used in some of the cities most eager to buy them. In June 2023 the company shut down and handed the remains to Sherwood Partners, the firm Silicon Valley calls when a startup wants to be liquidated without the word bankruptcy attached.

~ the case file ~

~ the part that was always going to be hard ~

Baking in a moving vehicle is a suspension problem pretending to be a cooking problem. Cheese that is molten at 200 degrees behaves like a liquid, and a liquid in an open tray responds to every pothole and every sharp right. Drivers reported pizzas arriving with the toppings piled against one edge. The ovens also drew enough power that the trucks needed their own generators, and each truck was a kitchen that had to be inspected and certified in whatever county it happened to be parked in.

The robots had a different problem. They were slower than a person, and a trained pizza cook assembles a pie in well under a minute without a software update.

~ the number people remember ~

Zume kept the name through the pivot, so the press in 2023 wrote headlines about a pizza company that had not made a pizza in three years. The domain is now a 404 served by Wix. What survives is the number. Four hundred and forty five million is the figure people reach for when they want to describe a venture-funded idea that nobody stress-tested against a road surface.

~ reading this from Ankara ~

Pizza delivery in Turkey is a man on a motorcycle with an insulated box on the back, and it works. The box is cheap, it is already cold-chain neutral, and nobody has ever proposed improving it with a generator. What made Zume hard to read from here was not the robots, which are easy enough to picture, but the premise that the last ten minutes of a pizza's life was a problem worth four hundred million dollars. Zume's pizza business never operated outside the Bay Area.

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