Kiss your lefty $15 minimum wage job goodbye, Silicon Valley has a new vision for the pizzeria. It involves lots of robots.

[Kiss My Azz Socialists]

Not long after the pizzeria Zume opened for business last year,
its kitchen staff noticed a problem with some of its pizzas:
they had holes in them.

It wasn’t the fault of the workers, who rolled out intact dough
bases. There wasn’t a kitchen mole prodding holes. It wasn’t
even the recipe — a Zume pizza base can handle its fair share of
toppings. It was the robots.

Josh Goldberg, 38, is the chief technology officer of the
Mountain View, Calif., pizza joint. Although most pizzerias
don’t have an engineering staff, let alone a CTO, Zume prides
itself on its use of automation to make operations more
efficient.

It estimates its kitchen can make 10 times more pizzas than a
pizzeria with a comparable staff. It has a robot that squirts
tomato sauce onto its pies. It has a robot that spreads the
sauce, mimicking the movements of Zume’s head chef. There’s a
robot arm (similar to those found in auto manufacturing
facilities) that puts the pie in the oven. And, as of this
month, there’s a robot that presses the dough into a perfect
circle.

So if the company has a non-human problem, it’s Goldberg’s
problem.

Observing operations in the company’s lab-like kitchen, Goldberg
watched as the human cooks spun glossy blobs of dough and placed
them on the conveyor belt. He watched as a camera hovering above
snapped a photo of the dough so it could inform the other robots
of the pizza’s size, shape and precise location. Another camera
detected the center of the pie and instructed a nozzle to squirt
sauce, and a delta robot — the kind used on assembly lines —
used a spiral movement to spread it. Humans topped the pizza
with pepperoni, fresh basil and cheese.

And just as the pizza was about to be put into the oven,
Goldberg found the problem.

There was a small gap between two conveyor belts. If both kept
moving, then the pizza would glide along without any problems.
But if the conveyor belts stopped for as little as two seconds,
part of the pizza would sink into the gap, creating a tear when
the machines started up again.

Fixing the problem was easy enough. Goldberg just had to program
the conveyor belt to not stop when a pizza was passing over the
gap.

But there are always new problems.

Robots need calibrating, code needs to be updated. Whenever
there’s a change in the dough or sauce recipe, the robots must
be taught new ways to work with different textures and
consistencies.

That’s why Zume has a team of 20 software engineers. And its 20-
person kitchen staff doesn’t just prep ingredients; many have
been trained to work with the robots. Its entire culinary team
uses project management tools such as Jira and Kanban, which are
typically used by software engineers at tech companies for
managing projects and fixing bugs. And other staff, such as
delivery drivers and line cooks, are being trained in data
science.

“We have fewer people, but we pay them much higher rates with
full benefits as opposed to having a proliferation of lower-
skilled workers,” said Julia Collins, Zume’s co-founder and co-
chief executive.

The goal isn’t end-to-end automation, Collins said. There are
still things that humans do better than machines, such as
prepping ingredients, making sauce, developing recipes and
knowing when something isn’t right with a pie. But automation
and software enables Zume to reduce costs, make more pizzas,
predict what pizzas people want before they order them and,
eventually, take on the big pizza chains.

At least that’s what investors — including the venture capital
firm SignalFire — are betting. They’ve put more than $23 million
into the company.

Zume is a new player in the "better pizza" movement, in which
upstart chains such as Blaze and 800 Degrees have built big
followings by offering higher quality ingredients with the speed
and convenience of Domino’s and Pizza Hut. And with its focus on
robotics, Zume joins a small but growing wave of eateries — so
far rooted in the Bay Area — that see automation as a way to
reduce costs.

To expand its operations, the company says it won’t need to
invest heavily in kitchens or storefronts. It will need only a
single new robot-equipped kitchen in each new metropolitan
market, relying on its fleet of oven-equipped trucks, each with
the capacity to bake and deliver more than 200 pizzas a day —
about the number of pies a single pizzeria sells.

“Ultimately, it’s a company that can scale and become the best
option for delivered pizza against any of the incumbents,” said
Chris Farmer, a SignalFire investor.

But if it succeeds, it has the potential to eliminate lots of
repetitive jobs. The restaurant industry is projected to employ
14.7 million people in 2017 — about 1 in 10 working Americans —
according to the National Restaurant Assn.

Joe Pawlak, managing principal at restaurant industry market
research firm Technomic, says it’s more likely that robots will
alter restaurant jobs than erase them.

“Automation will change the complexion of the workforce more
than it drastically changes numbers,” he said.

That’s because many diners want food that’s hand-crafted and
made with care — not put together an on assembly line, he said.
Pawlak believes the restaurant industry workforce could grow
more sophisticated as robots pick up some of the more repetitive
jobs.

Collins, the Zume executive, sees an opportunity to train
today’s low-skilled workers for tomorrow’s robot wrangling, and
to create high-tech jobs where they previously didn’t exist —
such as Goldberg’s role at the pizzeria.

“I’m the every-technology minder,” said Goldberg, who oversees
Zume’s robots, conveyor belts, software, apps, and the ovens
built into the trucks that let the company cook pizzas while
they are being delivered.

Goldberg got his start in electrical engineering in the 1990s
before making the switch to software development. He worked at
an e-publishing company at one point, spent nearly a decade
developing software and systems for online dating sites, and has
run his own web-hosting business on the side. His last food
service industry job was 23 years ago when he worked in a bagel
shop.

“When I told people I was leaving my old job and going to make
pizza, they thought I was joking,” he said.

But as automation becomes more pervasive, a growing number of
his peers are finding work in industries that previously had no
need for them.

One of the big pushes came decades ago when car manufacturing
became automated, and software engineers found themselves
building the machines that built the machines. As automation
enters new industries — food, finance, healthcare — he believes
engineers will find themselves in places they never imagined. In
San Francisco, engineers already are working at automated coffee
shops, quinoa restaurants and, soon, burger joints.

Previously confined to a desk, Goldberg’s engineering duties now
have him going back and forth between Zume’s engineering office
and the kitchen next door. He works with Zume’s chefs to figure
out what technology they need to get the robots to follow the
culinary team’s recipes.

To update the robots’ software, Goldberg must unlock a metal
closet a few feet from the pizza conveyor belts. It’s filled
with wiring that controls all of the robots — and can be
accessed only in person to prevent a hacker from taking control
of the pizza assembly line.

It’s one way the job differs from other engineering gigs.

"If it's virtual and someone says, ‘Hey look, this thing is on
fire,’ it just means the process has gone wrong,” Goldberg said.
“Here, if something is on fire, they could be speaking
literally.”

http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-zume-pizza-
automation-20170706-story.html