The pizza of the future

[madoka]

Wow, this sounds pretty amazing. Healthier, baked on-route to your house, made by robots, new boxes, predictive ordering, etc.

Has anyone tried it and can comment on taste?

https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/pizza-making-robots-want-change-world-175742922.html

Here's an excerpt on the pizza box:

Garden and his team have obsessed over every aspect of the American pizza-delivery system—including the box. Zume’s pizza is excellent, but the box is a masterpiece. (“So you redesigned the box?” I asked him. His reply: “We didn’t redesign the box. We designed the box.”)

It’s made of compressed sugar cane (!), so it’s compostable, biodegradable, and collapsible—you can fold it up to fit your compost or trash can. Garden says that it also keeps the pizza warmer, keeps it dry, and prevents it from getting soggy, thanks to eight narrow channels below the pizza, like spokes. They conduct moisture down and away from the crust, pooling in a shallow well under the middle. “Your hands will be completely clean after you eat a Zume pizza, because there’s no grease or sogginess anywhere.”

(This I found hard to believe. But as my family discovered when we ate Zume pizza that night, it’s absolutely true: Our fingers were not greasy.)

The box’s lid slips under the lower box, which (a) creates a nice little stand and (b) doesn’t occupy your entire table with the ugly, greasy open lid, as a regular box does.

It even has shallow round depressions that match depressions in the top of the lid, so that stacked boxes sort of interlock. “With one hand, you can carry five pizzas and walk around, and there’s no hope of them falling over,” Garden points out.

Here's an excerpt on how he redesigned the pizza delivery vehicle:

But Alex Garden isn’t finished yet. He’s also reinvented the delivery truck.

Each one contains 28 or 56 individual pizza ovens. By consulting GPS, the truck fires up the oven when it’s four minutes away from your house, so that the pizza is coming out of the oven as the truck arrives.

That cook-en-route system might sound like it was designed to give you freshly baked pizza, but it was actually Garden’s solution to a knotty governmental problem: It’s against the law for workers to cook food in a truck while it’s moving.

The solution, of course, was to automate the cooking while in motion. No person is involved, and so no laws are broken.

Laws also dictate, by the way, that a food truck must contain a three-compartment sink—for washing utensils, spatulas, and so on. Garden didn’t want to devote precious oven space to some sink apparatus. So he came up with a utensil-free truck. As the pizza finishes cooking, it ejects from its oven like a CD from its player, and goes directly into the Zume pizza box. “No one ever touches the food,” he says, and so there’s no need for a sink in the truck.

 

[MagnusTheBrewer]

Another solution in search of a problem.

 

[shortylickens]

The pizza of the future is already in our past:

 

[RichieZ]

its not that good, funny enough my coworkers husband is one of the VC's that backed Zume