I don’t get it. When I order a pizza, I care about its taste, hygiene, and the time it takes to arrive. Why would I even care whether it was cooked by humans or robots?
I think they were trying to use the technology to get the pizzas to their customers faster and cheaper than a typical pizza place. I actually ordered from them a bunch a few years ago before they shut down, they were pretty good - good food, good prices, fast delivery. I guess it just wasn't sustainable though, which is unfortunate.
The pizzas are pre-assembled by a 6dof arm at a production facility, this is their value add as being equivalent of replacing the manual labor to finish a pizza similar to what Costco food court's been doing.
The pizzas are then par-baked in a van with built in ovens, then when given the order ticket the ovens then switch to baking mode after determining routing information.
The vision is that all these work smoothly and in tangent to give you the best tasting, cleanest, hottest pizza upon arrival.
The robot stuff is to hype them up to be futuristic and worthy of half a billion dollars instead of bunch of biz, tech, and ops folks hanging around a big empty warehouse in Sunnyvale configuring and reconfiguring lines, with a motor pool full of food trucks installed with heavy ass ovens with no where to go and a iPhone app using Onfleet API.
The "in trucks" part of "robots in trucks" does seem to be the more important bit. That your pizza is arriving at your home, fresh from the oven. Perhaps the robot part is needed because 2 people in a truck is too expensive.
I’m not from the US, but would the initial capex and the ongoing maintenance expenses for the robots really be cheaper than a couple of minimum wage workers. IMO, a better approach would be to start with “people in trucks”, and gradually introduce robots as they scale. Something like Uber’s vision of offering cheaper rides using self driving cars (but more realistic).
Yes, though cynically, I think the idea is that venture capitalists only open their wallets if they can see your robot in action. Prudent iteration doesn't attract money.