We’ve all heard that robots are taking our jobs, right? Well, there’s a takeout joint in Mountain View where robots help make the pizza, and it illustrates how automation could impact the food industry.
Zume is tucked into an office park and it only delivers pizza. Its brand is about being healthy and locally sourced, and Zume pays for the better ingredients in part by saving on labor costs in the kitchen, says Julia Collins, co-founder and co-CEO of Zume.
“In a lot of ways it looks like a traditional kitchen,” Collins says as she shows me around Zume’s kitchen. “But what you’ve never seen before is a robot-enabled pizza assembly line.”
Collins walks me down the line. The first thing you notice is there are people working on the line. They make about $18 an hour, and one of them is Jose Lopez. He’s holding a mound of dough.
“So Jose has taken our dough, and he’s using this dough bot to press the dough out,” Collins says, as Lopez places the dough into a rectangular machine.