When the Zume hits your eye, like a big pizza pie...

Just in case you're under the mistaken notion that all Silicon Valley crazy money gets invested in apps, Softbank dropped a bundle - admittedly a smallish bunder of $375M - on Zume, a pizza company. 

Oh, Zume wasn't any old pizza money. It combined the beauty and wonder of the food truck with the beauty and wonder of robotics. That and the beauty and wonder of pizza dough and toppings.

Here's the Zume vision:

Their trucks were going to be equipped with pizza ovens that would bake the pizza on the way to making a delivery. No more luke-warm pizza served out of an insulated bag. And the pizza wouldn't be made by a guy standing behind a little window in the kitchen - the guy who you watch tossing the pizza dough in the air, only you can't see his head, only the pizza dough flying up and down. Zume pizza would be put together by a robot. 

There's only one pizza maker I remember whose head you could see while he dough-tossed. This was at Regina's Pizzeria in the 1970's - back before Regina's was a chain, back when Regina's was just the little place on Thatcher and North Margin that you had to wait for hours to get into but which was worth it once you got in. Their pizzas were oily but delish. And I think the only drink at that time was Coke in glass bottles. What else do you need to go with oily pizza?

And speaking of oily, at Regina's, they had this good-enough looking young guy who wore his hair in an ultra slick, Brylcreemed up pompadour that was a throw back to the doo-wop 1950's. He fancied himself a ladies' man, and would wink at and flirt with all the "girls" (as we then thought of ourselves) who came into Regina's. He was a total hoot, but he could absolutely toss a pizza.

I doubt that the Zume robot could do that!

Not that we'll be finding out. 

In January, Zume downsized, cutting 360 jobs and trimming itself to 300 employees. Employees who'll be focused on Zume's new business:

...packaging and efficiency gains for other food delivery companies. In a note to employees, [CEO Alex] Garden said that improving the global food system required increased focus and that the pizzas had served as “inspiration” for higher-growth businesses. (Source: Bloomberg)

So that's where the $375M from Soft-in-the-head-Bank went. For inspiration.

Most of it, perhaps, but some of it went to buy and refurbish a double-decker London bus that  they were planning for using for their Day-Z launch date - one of  the 10,000 buses (not all double-decker imports) that the company envisioned it would need once the robot-made-baked-on-route concept took off.

Which it did not.

As it turned out, humans still had to be involved in production. It took humans "to load the racks of assembled, unbaked pizzas into the trucks." (Pre-assembled, huh? I just knew that those robots weren't going to be pizza-dough-tossers.)

Then there were a couple of problems. Customers complained that the dough was undercooked. That the sauce and toppings were skimpy. And

...the cheese tended to run everywhere as the trucks turned or hit bumps in the road. Instead, the oven trucks began parking in central locations, with runner cars or mopeds transporting the cooked pies.

Domino delivers!

Garden was able to suck in SoftBank as much on his strength as a pitchman as on the soundness of his idea. He wanted to be "the Tesla of fresh food...the Amazon of fresh food." (Where have we seen this show before? WeWork, anyone?) Alas:

A visionary founder with a fire hose of money can’t solve every problem. Often, that combo creates new ones. “I’ve never seen data to suggest that being charismatic and confident and overly brash is linked to a successful business,” says Kellie McElhaney, founding director of the Center for Equity, Gender, and Leadership at the University of California at Berkeley’s business school. 

So now Zume is remaking itself. Packaging is part of the new and improved Zume. But the company's experiencing a few hiccups along the new way, too. Zume purchased a packaging company "to jump-start its ability to sell compostable containers to other business." Unfortunately, this packaging company's boxes contained chemicals that the EPA has said can be harmful to humans. Because of this, they couldn't be sold in all states. Oopsie.

Anyway, thanks to that SoftBank investment - which Zume, fortunately, didn't completely squander - the pink-slipped employees supposedly got decent severance packages. That said, on lay-off day, employees who were canned in the morning asked if "they could stay through the usual catered lunch." HR told them no. Wonder whether robot-prepared pizza was served.