Posted on 06/05/2023 11:51:19 AM PDT by nickcarraway
Hundreds of millions of dollars later, the California startup that tried to disrupt pizza delivery has gone belly up.
Zume, which had raised a total of $445 million since its founding in 2015, ceased operations last month and is liquidating its assets, according to a report from The Information. Once based in Mountain View but most recently headquartered in Camarillo, the firm planned to cook pizzas in the back of a massive truck, with robots, while en route to customers’ homes.
In 2016, Zume delivered its first pies, and positive reviews rolled in on Yelp. But Bloomberg reported that the company quickly gave up on the cooking-while-driving model — cheese kept sliding around when the truck hit bumps in the road — and started parking in central locations to send out typical deliveries.
Nevertheless, investors were intrigued — particularly SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son, famous for the $100 billion “Vision Fund” that dumped $4.4 billion into WeWork. Bloomberg reported that Zume CEO Alex Garden was projecting hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and talking about becoming the “Tesla of fresh food, and the Amazon of fresh food,” trying to get Son to invest.
In 2018, SoftBank poured $375 million into the company, according to Pitchbook, valuing the startup, still with a relatively untested product, at around $2.25 billion.
The money didn’t last. Zume had employees jump from project to project, including a monthslong push to build a sensor that would monitor the heat of food as it was delivered, Bloomberg reported. The firm burned through cash without bringing in much revenue (less than $1 million in 2019, according to Bloomberg), and at the beginning of 2020, Zume quit the pizza game, laid off half of its staff and pivoted into engineering sustainable packaging.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
“Tesla of fresh food”
You would need a government mandate ordering everybody to eat pizza to “save the planet” to make that work....
lol.
Wow!What a stupid idea.
I have to disagree with you there. Some things the government has to mandate. Eating pizza is not one.
But I bet the original founders are sipping mai tais on the beach in Aruba right now.
““Tesla of fresh food””
LOL! Tesla had $23.4 billion profit in 2022 on revenues of $71 billion. A YOY 37% increase.
In, fairness, didn’t it take Tesla longer than 8 years to turn a profit. They were losing a huge amount of money for a long time, right?
Give me $400 million, and I could mail you a pizza. Since for most delivery service costs are ‘last mile’ I’ll cut that cost by contracting with the postal service to deliver them. I want to patent a system to put them in a tube so they’ll fit in a standard mailbox. Thinking about outsorcing the factory to Mexico to cut costs.
“the company quickly gave up on the cooking-while-driving model — cheese kept sliding around when the truck hit bumps in the road”
I barely made it outta high school and I know the importance of research and development.....looks like they skipped it and went right into full production mode.......not too bright. SMH
How about pizza sent in pneumatic tubes, like they use to have at banks?
Robotic food trucks
My idea would be to create a central pizza manufacturing facility. Users would then come to this pizza-manufacturing hub, and eat the pizza there. They could also take them away, in what would be essentially self-service home-delivery
I would call these pizza-manufacturing hubs “restaurants.”
How about drones with pizza ovens slung underneath? What could go wrong?
That’s crazy talk.
I think another company does that.
Who?
I’m kind of getting what you are talking about, I just can’t picture it.
The cooking while driving thing was a dumb idea.
Robotic delivery is not. Someone will perfect this eventually and DoorDash etc. will be toast.
She really took a beating. We learned a valuable lesson as kids.
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