Back in 2016, we brought you the sad news that robots were making pizza and the end of the world was probably soon to follow.

I don’t know about you, but when I think about pizza, I think about comfort food, evenings with friends, all the times I moved house and needed something to take the edge off.

None of that aligns with the idea of a machine churning out pepperoni and mushroom on mozzarella.

The company responsible for the abomination of robot pizza is Zume, a Silicon Valley start-up that wanted to take the love out of pizza-making.

Turns out you can’t keep a good thing down, because four years later Zume’s robots have gone into retirement.

Per The Verge, it all started when Zume, the “pizzas-made-by-robots-and-cooked-during-delivery start-up” attracted a $375 million investment from Softbank’s Masayoshi Son.

Zume’s pitch was robots that could make pizzas a person would want to eat, so Son climbed aboard in the driveway of his Woodside, Calif., estate to watch as the truck’s ovens fired up some robot-made pies, according to people familiar with the meeting.

Co-CEO Alex Garden made some lofty claims about what could be achieved with pizza sans the human touch.

In the fall of 2018, SoftBank delivered its Vision Fund cash. After one conversation with Son, Garden choked up relaying the details to a confidant, saying, “Masa says I’m going to change the world,” this person recalls

Simmer down, there, buddy. It’s just pizza, and couldn’t have been very good because, in January of this year, Zume fired half of its workforce and shut down its robots.

‘Farm to pizza’ – with some robotic intervention along the way.

In an attempt to recoup the losses accrued due to the inevitable failure of the pizza business, the company will now be focusing on packaging and efficiency gains for other food delivery companies.

Meanwhile, everything is once again right with the world.

If you really want a pizza, you can get it the old fashioned way – made to perfection and delivered to your door.

Go ahead and order ‘The Rotherham’ – bacon, feta, and salami, made with a thin base, and HALF the normal amount of cheese – and you may even feel like Seth’s right there with you.

You can grab one of those gems as part of the specials from Butler’s Pizza, whilst celebrating another win for humanity against the robot uprising.

[source:verge]