Zume Fires Pizza Robots, Pivots To Pizza Boxes

Zume Pizza launched in 2016 with a single mission: to "disrupt" the restaurant industry, using robots and artificial intelligence to eliminate human jobs. Now it has announced that, after four years, its self-contained pizza-making trucks will no longer roam the streets of Silicon Valley.

Zume raised close to a billion dollars to revolutionize the pizza industry, but, after acquiring Pivot Packaging last year, it's decided to pivot its focus from pizza to pizza boxes. In October it teamed up with Pizza Hut for a limited run of the the "Pizza Pod," a round, compostable box made of plant fibers that's said to keep pizza crisper and less prone to delivery mishaps.

Now that the robots have been eliminated, Zume plans to add 100 new jobs to its burgeoning packaging business and is encouraging the 252 people it just laid off to apply.