Zume, a California-based brand focused on creating a more sustainable food system, is partnering with &pizza, a popular East Coast pizza chain, to use its Forward Mobile Kitchens to expand the restaurant brand into new markets and test products before adding them to its brick-and-mortar menus. The goal, according to both companies, is providing a “seamless brand experience” across all of its different restaurant formats, which include commissary kitchens and food trucks.
Zume’s leasable mobile kitchens are like food trucks focused exclusively on delivery. Meals are cooked on site, and then handed over to delivery drivers who bring them directly to consumers. They use predictive analytics to estimate daily order volume, and can be customized to match a wide range of restaurant concepts.
With 36 locations along the East Coast, D.C.-based &pizza is known for its oblong pizzas, creative ingredients, long queues, locally influenced restaurant designs and CEO Michael Lastoria’s outspoken support of higher minimum wages. The brand is also popular with investors, previously securing $25 million in funding.
Zume CEO and Chairman Alex Garden said he was attracted by a partnership “with a forward-thinking restaurant chain like &pizza who is an innovator and who shares our belief that food should be a catalyst for a better world.”
“Zume’s Forward Mobile Kitchens give us the flexibility to capitalize on non-tradition allocations and extend the brand experience to more customers,” said &pizza President and COO Andy Hooper. “The process of creating a technologically integrated experience in our pizza shops has a considerable lead time, so we’re leveraging mobile units to share our product and story before we open a physical space.”
Click HERE for a video of Zume’s mobile kitchens in action.
