Julia Collins and her company Zume, revolutionize fast food industry

Co-founder and CEO Julia Collins, reveals that she wants her company – Zume – to make high-quality, affordable food accessible.

ZDNet | A robotics startup called Zume Pizza, which is automating en route pizza production, earlier this month, confirmed that the company has raised almost US$50 million in venture funding.

Why so much money for a company automating pizza production and delivery? Because, according to Collins, if successful, it will change the way fast food operates by increasing speed and freshness while reducing a significant portion of labor costs.

Which is especially important in the restaurant industry. Food costs are going down, which is good news for fast food companies, but labor costs have been rising steadily. The cost of labor as a percentage of sales rose 0.8 percent in 2016, according to the consulting firm BDO.

Since fast food relies on low-skill, repeatable tasks, it is the perfect use-case for automation. That has led to a rush of innovation in food service.

Watch Julia Collins explain how Zume delivers made-to-order pizza with robots:

The company, which is already delivering pizzas in Silicon Valley, uses an assembly line of robots to flatten dough into circles, spread sauce and cheese, and slide the pies into and out of an 800 degree oven.

The process begins on a robotic assembly line in a centralized kitchen, but pizzas finish cooking in ovens inside of trucks en route to delivery.

Cashless Transactions

Zume uses predictive analytics to figure out which toppings are going to be most popular in a given area and when demand might surge – for example, during a major sporting event.
Like Uber, transactions are cashless.

Zume Pizza has more than 100 employees and sources its robotic arms from ABB, a maker of industrial robots.

Collins and her company are looking to be the fulcrum for a wider push toward automation for the food industry – one that frees up humans to work on the more creative tasks like creating recipes – while robots do the boring and backbreaking stuff.