One food delivery startup in San Francisco, known as Zume Pizza, is close to reaching a fully automated process, thanks to the help of robots and AI. They've just this week announced the addition of the Doughbot into their pizza-making process.

According to those who founded the company, they wanted to bring robots in to take over tasks where human employees were bored, where they were engaged in a task that wasn't deemed to be safe, or for doing a task that is very physically taxing for humans.

Speed & Quality...

They have turned to robots to take over tasks like making pizza dough and they've fittingly named the robot Doughbot and it's already working on the assembly line.

The robot is able to press the pizza dough roughly 5x faster than human workers, it makes a perfectly flat pizza crust every 9 seconds. With the addition of their Doughbot it's going to lower the pizza-making process by an average of 36 seconds.

The food startup was founded several years ago and they just recently expanded their delivery services and are pioneering a new way of delivering pizza with their decentralized delivery model.

It's estimated that they can have the pizza to the door of the customer in around four minutes thanks to their highly efficient and streamlined process. Right now, the only job that humans are doing for the pizza process is putting the toppings on the pizzas, the robots do everything else.

The company is aggressively competing when it comes to delivery times and who knows how many customers that might entice to opt for purchasing a pizza from them, when it can be there within 10 minutes or less, whereas most other big pizza chains are going to take sometimes an hour or more depending on where you live.

The reason that they are quicker at getting the pizza to the customer is because they have trucks that bake the pizza on the way to where it is going.

The pizza is quite often going to arrive to the customers house much fresher than if it had come from one of the other chains because of this bake it on the way process.

After it comes out of the oven with traditional chains, the product then needs to travel in the car before it gets to the house and this is why it often won't be as fresh than if it had gotten to you in 5 minutes or less; fresh right out of the oven. Zume is adding scooters to their business as well so that they can work along with the food trucks. Also, Zume doesn't always hit the 5 min delivery mark, for those who place orders that aren't in the truck's pre-loaded orders then it can take sometimes 45 minutes.

But for many who do order though, they are able to experience the quick service time of around 4 minutes for their pizza. And this isn't the only food delivery company that has incorporated robots or AI technology, there are others even in the San Francisco area and also delivering meals in other places around the world as well.

It looks like Zume almost wants to imitate the same vision that Amazon shared previously, with their idea for having flying warehouses that drones would be able to connect with, operating together like one big network.

Zume is a lot different from other pizza restaurants in that they obviously have much fewer employees. It's alleged that not a single employee has ever quit from their establishment and for those who do work for the company, they are allotted education subsidies, along with shares in the business, and provided with full benefits. Their “co-bot” workforce model is one that perhaps we might see imitated at many other companies in the near future. At the end of the day, it's the people ( the customers ) who are going to be deciding the success of these companies and whether or not they live or die. So far the Zume company has already delivered well over 10,000 pizzas.