It seems robots are everywhere, and not just in the places people would expect, such as science labs or hospitals. Now, they’re also giving a mechanical hand to the food industry, Fox Business reports.
Zume Pizza is located in Silicon Valley, America’s cradle of innovation and modern technology, so it’s no wonder that the start-up restaurant has decided to hire a different kind of help. The pizza place began deliveries in April and is one of the growing number of food-tech companies that is looking to upend traditional restaurant practices by using software and robots to cut down on costs, speed up production and provide a safer work environment.
Zume’s kitchen in Mountain View has a unique scene: pizza dough goes down a conveyor belt, where robots add and spread the sauce before carefully placing them inside extremely hot ovens.
The rest — slicing ingredients and spreading cheese over the pies — is still done by human hands.
Zume’s co-founder and executive chairperson, Alex Garden, says, “We are going to be the Amazon of food.” Garden certainly has the background to make the statement work. He was the former president of Zynga Studios and a general manager at Microsoft’s Xbox Live, Bloomberg reports. If all goes well, Garden intends to dominate the billion-dollar pizza industry with pies made by machines. Zume also has special delivery trucks that will finish cooking pizzas on the way to customers, ready to roll if approval comes through.
Julia Collins, a restaurant veteran with 37 years in the industry to her name, is the company’s CEO and co-founder.
The pizza robots were created by Swiss company ABB, along with an international team of mechanical, electrical and software engineers. Marta, the robot in charge of the sauce, can ladle and spread in under two seconds. Bruno, a five-foot machine, does the oven handling of the raw pies.
Tech experts and scientists predict that more restaurants will soon turn to automated processes in the future.
