Zume Pizza's Robots Are the New Kings of Pizza Tech

Your next pizza could be made by robots. Not too long from now it could also be cooked on a moving truck, cutting down on the amount of time between ordering a delicious pie and chowing down on that succulent blend of all the food groups.

That’s the future as imagined by Zume Pizza, anyway. It’s a Silicon Valley startup founded by Julia Collins and Alex Garden in 2015 that promises to make artisanal pizzas available to everyone by using the best ingredients and having robots take on more and more responsibility in the kitchen. Then, eventually, it could deploy a fleet of trucks that will be equipped with a bunch of pizza ovens that can cook dozens of pizzas at a time while they’re in motion.

Zume Pizza isn’t quite there yet. It currently uses robots for basic, repetitive tasks like putting sauce on the crust and shoving the pies into the oven. But eventually, maybe, robots could take over everything from creating the dough and adding toppings to cutting the pizza into eight perfect slices and shoving them all into a box. Later, the whole setup can be made portable using the trucks described above.

Here’s a video from Scott’s Pizza Tours showing Zume’s sauce robot in action:

Zume Pizza isn’t the only pizzeria going high-tech. Domino’s plans to deliver pizzas with drones, Pizza Hut has boxes that work like turntables and Papa John’s created an Apple TV app that can be used to order from its full menu.

What’s interesting about Zume Pizza’s ambitions is that they combine many recent tech trends. It’s got robots in the kitchen, its pizzas can be ordered through an app, and once it’s developed its pizza-cooking delivery trucks, it isn’t hard to imagine a future in which a self-driving oven-filled truck bakes pizzas while more humanoid robots deliver them to customer’s doors.

See? And here we thought the future of robots was scary. Turns out it’s just going to be incredibly delicious.