Pizza vending machines never took off. | Photo courtesy of 800 Go
The news this week that Zume Pizza is being revived by Flippy owner Miso Robotics got me feeling a little nostalgic.
Zume famously tried and failed to bake pizza in delivery vans en route to customers. It was an ambitious idea that could have transformed the pizza business, until it didn’t. Zume gave up on pizza in 2020 and shut down completely in 2023.
The restaurant tech world is littered with stories like these: Innovative ideas that never take off, and sometimes crash in spectacular fashion.
Here are three that came to mind.
Dynamic pricing
This is one of those that crashed and burned, and it’s very easy to pinpoint why.
To recap, dynamic pricing is the concept of changing prices based on factors like demand or time of day. It’s also known as surge pricing and is common practice in the ride-sharing and travel industries.
Restaurants began toying with the idea coming out of the pandemic as many menus turned digital, paving the way for real-time price adjustments. The argument was that it could help restaurants drive business by lowering prices during slower periods, similar to happy hour.
Then, in February 2024, Wendy’s CEO Kirk Tanner mentioned on an earnings call that the chain planned to test dynamic pricing in the drive-thru. The comment went largely unnoticed until the New York Post published a story saying that Wendy’s was going to use “surge pricing” to gouge people for their burgers.
Backlash ensued. Wendy’s quickly walked back the comments, saying they’d been misconstrued and that it had no intention of raising prices during busy times.
But the damage had been done, and conversations about dynamic pricing soon ground to a halt.
“The more companies we spoke with, we started to hear, ‘I don’t want to become the next Wendy’s,’” said Ashwin Kamlani, founder of the dynamic pricing company Juicer, after it discontinued the product that August.
Subscription programs
In late 2020, I tabbed subscription programs like Panera’s Unlimited Sip Club as a pandemic-era innovation that was likely to stick around.
I wasn’t totally wrong. The Sip Club still exists, offering members free daily drinks, delivery, and other perks for $120 a year.
But many of the other programs inspired by Sip Club didn’t work out. Taco Bell, Sweetgreen, and Dickey’s all tried subscriptions around the same time and evidently chose not to continue.
It’s not totally clear why. Maybe the math didn’t work, or these brands decided to focus more on their traditional loyalty programs. Most likely, though, there just wasn’t that much demand for them.
To get the most out of a restaurant subscription like this, you have to be a heavy user of that brand, visiting at least once a week, if not multiple times. But restaurants don’t have much incentive to give away free stuff to people who would likely be visiting anyway. And a subscription might not be enough to change the behavior of the occasional customer.
For instance, I tested Panera’s Sip Club (for journalism reasons) and found that it would have been pretty inconvenient to get my money’s worth of free coffee every month. Panera just isn’t part of my daily routine.
Subscription programs have been far more successful for delivery apps like DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Amazon. There’s real value in getting those hefty delivery fees waived. And these apps are literally at your fingertips, so they’re much more convenient to use than driving 3 miles to a Panera to get your daily free coffee.
Restaurant vending machines
COVID-19 gave rise to a lot of weird inventions, hot-food vending machines being one of them.
Vending machines are, of course, “contactless,” so they are safe to use in a pandemic. They also cater to customers on the go, and you can put them anywhere.
With all that going for them, companies offering these machines proliferated in the early 2020s. Chowbotics, Piestro, Basil Street, and RoboBurger hit the market with fully automated kitchens in small boxes, in some cases backed by venture capital.
Today, most of them are gone.
Was this a tech problem? Or was the stigma around “vending machine food” just too much to overcome?
According to Phil McKee, whose attempt to develop a hot-food vending machine led him to create the TurboChef oven, the answer is both.
Vending machines have a lot of technical requirements, he said. There’s a matter of keeping the food fresh, which means either freezing or refrigerating it. But cooking from frozen takes a long time, and refrigerated food spoils, so brisk sales are a necessity.
Electrical power is another challenge. Most vending machines are found in places with a typical 120V circuit, like an airport or college campus. That’s OK for a microwave, but it’s not the type of power needed to produce the kind of mouthfeel one would expect from a restaurant.
A bigger problem may be that there’s just too much competition for vending machines to really make a dent.
“A large portion of the U.S. population is never more than a few minutes from a fast-food joint, and delivery is pretty much ubiquitous,” McKee wrote in an email. “The consumer has better options in most locations.”
He concluded his email with some wisdom that might as well apply to all of the fads above:
“Entrepreneurism is a powerful force. Some young turk or ‘turkette’ may think up a way to solve for all this one day,” he wrote. “The opposing force on that one is: If they are smart enough to crack this, they are probably smart enough to start any number of businesses with wider appeal and shorter walls to climb.”
