The fall (and rise) of robot pizza

While the dream of robots cooking your delicious pizza pie en route to your door remains a bizarre dream for soon-to-be-bankrupt would-be deliverers Zume Pizza, it seems the tech industry has not ended its costly pursuit of fully automated pizza delivery.

Zume, now liquidating assets as the sound of the death toll rings loudly, was once worth close to half a billion dollars, and the startup received a generous US$375 million investment from SoftBank, who joined them in envisioning company trucks zipping through metro areas with robot chefs cooking up hot pizza pies on the go-to-your-door.

But if you think robots cooking pizzas in a moving truck sounds simple enough, you would be wrong, and the cheese tended to go flying whenever it hit so much as a speed bump.

And if you think humans pouring more money into another automated pizza delivery service sounds dumb, but likely, you would be right.

Automated hopefuls

While not hitting the early investor highs of Zume, Stellar Pizza has gone through a US$16.5 million Series A financing round, with a group of former Space-X engineers and Jay-Z’s venture capital firm backing in another try at the apparently immense and unlocked value of robo-pizza.

Picnic Works, Nala Robotics and Pietro Pods, are all trying their hand at automated kitchens, envisioning a broadened market scope that includes chips, nuggets, and other beige concoctions favoured by the developmentally arrested.

AI’s Pizza

It is not only robotic hands companies that are looking to get involved in the Margherita Market; Dominos uses artificially intelligent eyes to check the distribution of pizza toppings, and Pizza Hut has rolled out an AI-powered mood detector at select locations – though I’m unsure what pizza it would recommend alleviating my unease.

Generative AI has already made its worth to me, at least by creating this thoroughly entertaining commercial.

Slice of the market

While the investment into Zume was elaborate, the fact remains that the global pizza market is worth about US$128 billion; Dominos alone sell one and a half million pizzas daily and increasing the margins on staffing and quality control could reap a windfall.

But is it worth investing in? Let’s ask another AI!

Thanks mate. And included is a gallery of AI-generated pizza robots made for this story. Bon Appetit.

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