Behold the Future of Pizza Delivery

Okay, so this may be a little off the wall for a motoring blog but stay with Automology's columnist MAC as he combines his two great passions in life - cars and food.

Recently we carried a story on how Uber was now branching out into the food delivery system, and why not? It is already the largest Taxi Company in the world without owning one taxi, so why not become the greatest food delivery chain without owning one oven.

As I was reading something or other, I came across this great new invention for what could easily be the solution to one of the world’s most pressing problems - how to stop pizzas from becoming soggy due to the amount of time it takes to get from the oven to your door. A new start-up company called Zume Pizza has designed and built the very first mobile pizza truck equipped with a total of 56 pizza ovens, guaranteed to deliver the pizza to the customer's door directly out of the oven, literally.

Now, you may need a moment or two to get used to the idea of receiving delivery of a pizza at home, with the cheese still bubbling on the top and the crust still crispy, but this isn’t really about eradicating the scourge of lukewarm soggy pies, but more of an attempt of a start-up to muscle in on a US$38 billion dollar market that is currently dominated across the globe by what are referred to as Big Box Chains. The US alone sees at least 40% of the market going to Pizza Hut, Domino’s, Little Caesar’s and Papa Johns. The rise of the smart phone has seen the home-delivery digital-ordering grow more than 300% faster than dine-in traffic, making this market absolutely ripe for some disruptive technology of this ilk. Zume is one of a number of Silicon Valley companies attempting to automate the food preparation business and is planning to add a dough-maker/press and truck-loader to the process. No need for pesky phone operators either - place your order via an app and the semi-automated process begins back in a central kitchen.



The new Zume Pizza delivery truck (pictured above) looks much like any other delivery truck from the outside, but it is on the inside where it starts to break with tradition. Inside, there are 56 pizza ovens which are controlled by traffic-predicting technology; the ovens then turn on automatically when the pizza is en route to the customer, making each pizza perfectly cooked when it arrives. All the driver (Zume calls him/her Pie-lot) has to do is cut the pie. Genius!

The Zume truck is already patented and the company sees this technology as just the first of many delivery trucks, all of which are designed to bring fresh food directly to your door. As of now, you can only order a Zume pizza in Mountain View, California, but according to the company's website, it will be rapidly expanding operations soon. Judging by the picture of the truck, though, I think that it will hit problems navigating busy streets and finding parking in congested inner cities, but if I could, I would still order one just for the heck of it.