The fundamental issue is that these pizzas are made expediently. There are compromises made in pursuit of automation and speed that make the pizza worse than Dominos/Pizza Hut/Papa John’s. Those aren’t paragons of pizza-making by any stretch, but they’re the competition.
Theoretically you can create a machine that puts out a pizza that rivals the best pies in Brooklyn or New Haven, every single time, but I guess investors thought that the plebs will eat fancy DiGiorno’s at Domino’s prices and not notice the difference.
Maybe one of the major pizza chains will buy Zume’s IP and iterate from there. I don’t think they’d deploy the technology until it reaches human-equivalence for at least some of their pizzas or part of the pizza-making process. Pizza chains can play the long game. A pizza robot startup valued at $500M can’t.