Delivery Drones Ready for Larger-Scale Take-Off
The quest to elevate grocery delivery – literally – continues. This week, airborne food delivery service Flytrex announced that it has completed 100,000 drone deliveries across its current service areas in North Carolina and Texas.
Some of those orders included containers assembled and flown from grocery store locations. According to Flytrex, the top three items ordered from grocery stores are bananas, limes and pints of ice cream.
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Progressive Grocer spoke with co-founder and CEO Yariv Bash about how drones provide another option to retailers looking to meet shoppers’ needs, especially when it comes to immediacy and convenience. He expects the pace of deployment to soon pick up.
“We have more than 100,000 deliveries of items from paying customers, delivering straight to their backyards in the largest operation of its kind in the United States. The FAA has already granted approval to Flytrex and companies like Flytrex, and we are waiting for one final approval from them that should pave the way for widespread use of drones for delivery,” he told PG.
The drones, which fly to 200 to 300 feet, are commercially viable to give grocers a way to executive faster deliveries at a competitive price. “Everything has to be optimized, and that’s what we have been busy building over the last few years – an end-to-end solution that enables the large-scale use of drones for last-mile delivery,” he explained.
There is a particularly strong opportunity in suburban areas, Bash noted, based on demand and logistics. “This is not a guy on a bicycle or someone driving a car. When you are doing dinner for your family, you want to order as fast as you can,” he said.
In addition to kitchen and pantry items, drones are capable of carrying ready-to-eat foods that could come from a foodservice area of a grocery store, like a pizza station or rotisserie chicken shelf. “It’s not just the fact that it arrives fast, it arrives fresh time and time again You can count on getting French fries crisp and food hot,” Bash asserted.
In that case, practice has made perfect. “We have teams that daily, from dusk ‘til dawn, deliver actual food items. We have a pizza oven and heat pizzas just before every test flight to make sure the cheese doesn’t fall off the pizza and that it arrives at the right time,” he reported.
Flytrex already partners with Walmart and is looking to broaden its literal and figurative horizons for last-mile grocery delivery. “This isn’t for your weekly list of groceries, but if you are missing items for dinner or want something you can have them shipped (this way),” the co-founder said, adding that the company is flexible in working with retailers, from setting up orders to originate from grocers’ websites to coordinating some operational aspects for them. “It’s really turning the relationship upside-down and making it a win-win situation for everyone.”
In addition to rapid service to shoppers, the drones offer other benefits as well. Flytrex emphasizes the sustainability aspects of drones, which are comparably lower in carbon emission than vehicles, and are not as risky as car accidents. For those wary about privacy, Bash pointed out that there are no cameras on the drones. “It’s much more private than a human knocking on your door and possibly gauging the size of the TV behind you,” Bash pointed out. As for safety concerns, the technology has been closely examined by FAA and the drones fly at a lower altitude than aircraft.
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He foresees airborne deliveries expanding and becoming part of the e-comm mix, especially since the targeted suburban market audience comprises 82 million backyards. “In the end, we are another channel for retailers and allow them to offer items to more consumers,” Bash remarked, adding, “2025 will be the year of when things really start to scale.”
For Bash, the foray into grocery has been interesting and rewarding on a personal level. Bash founded the Israeli startup Flytrex in 2013 and later worked on the first private mission to the moon in 2019 (the craft ultimately crashed on the moon’s surface). “I went from 200,000 miles to 200 feet,” he said with a laugh.
Other companies that may see an uptick in drone delivery following new FAA approvals include Amazon, which operates Prime Air drones and recently expanded its service; DroneUp which has also worked with Walmart; and Zipline, another Walmart partner. The FAA is closer to okaying more Beyond Visual Line of Sight flights.
