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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

drones

Manna to Make Drone Delivery Flights Outside Dublin, Ireland Next Month

Meal delivery by drone is coming to the outskirts of Dublin, Ireland at the end of March, courtesy of the Irish startup, Manna, reports Bloomberg. Manna will run hundreds of tests flights with different food partners to make deliveries to the University College Dublin campus over the next few weeks as part of a bigger plan to provide permanent service to small Irish towns.

Manna’s MNA-1090 drone operates similarly to the Google Wing drone, in that it hovers above its destination and lowers its package on a retractable tether. According to Blooomberg the Manna drone can carry a meal payload weighing 4.4 pounds, and can make a delivery more than 2 kilometers out in under three minutes, even in inclement weather.

Drones are set to have a pretty big year in food delivery. In addition to Manna’s impending takeoff, Unilever, through its Ben & Jerry’s brand, has partnered with Terra Drone Europe for airborne ice cream tests. Uber Eats is planning to launch its drone food delivery in San Diego this summer. And the aforementioned Google Wing is already making deliveries in Virginia.

Questions remain, however, about the ultimately viability of drone delivery. Regulations around toting pizza pies in the skies has yet to be worked out (though startups like Air Space Link are helping sort that out). Then there is the very real issue of privacy and noise and how people will react to fleets of drones flying over their houses.

The promise of drones, however, according to Manna, is that they can provide fast, big city-type food delivery to smaller towns at a lower cost. This, in turn will make delivery more profitable and drone operations more scalable.

If drones can provide a lower cost way of getting a piping hot burrito delivered to people’s patio, all the hindrances might just be forgiven.

Video: Airspace Link Gets Immediate FAA Approvals for Commercial Drone Flights

The idea of drones zipping through the sky to deliver you burritos in just minutes sounds so cyberpunky and cool. Because it is! That’s why companies like Google and Uber Eats are investing so heavily in the technology.

But as with so many things, to get something that’s cool, there is a lot of very unglamorous grunt work going on behind the scenes. For commercial drone deliveries, Airspace Link is looking to make one of those bits of drudgery a little bit easier: plotting out and receiving official approval for flight paths.

Airspace Link works with both the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and local governments to help commercial drone operators understand both air and ground risks and establish approved flight paths. Michael Healander, CEO and President of Airspace Link, told me by phone this week that his company is one of only five in the world that can authorize commercial drone flights near airports to ensure that they don’t interfere with things like air traffic. (Healander said that “near” is typically within five miles of an airport.)

But getting federal clearance for a flight path and understanding air-based risk is only one half of the equation. That’s why Airspace also works with local governments to get data around ground-based risks that the FAA wouldn’t know about. Those risks include things like schools, jails, or even emergency situations that a commercial drone operator would want to know about and avoid when establishing a flight plan for a delivery.

Airspace’s value prop, according to Healander, is that its software can automate that flight plan process quickly and automatically. To illustrate, Airspace Link posted a video on Linkedin this week, showing how the software works. The video is in no way “cool.” There is no dramatic footage of a drone soaring through a forest of skyscrapers. It’s a screen capture video of someone entering the basics of a drone flight: departure point, delivery point, time of flight etc. Once all that information is in, Airspace Link establishes a route that takes into consideration the ground-based risks like schools, establishes a route and altitude path and gets approval from the FAA in under a minute.

We are at the very beginning stages of drone delivery, with Google testing the concept in Virginia, and Uber Eats planning it for next summer in San Diego. If these services catch on with consumers, there will be a halo effect with startups like AirSpace Link popping up to do more of the grunt work so drones deliveries can actually take off and be cool.

From Power to Perception, What Challenges Do Drone and Robot Delivery Need to Tackle?

The devil is in the details, as they say, and this became more apparent then ever after I moderated a panel on robot and drone delivery at GreenBiz’s Verge 19 conference in Oakland, CA this week. These devilish details, however, are important for everyone involved in the food space: retailers, delivery services, governments and even consumers to consider as autonomous robotic delivery moves from sci-fi to sidewalk.

On the panel were Jill North, Innovation and New Technology Program Manager for the City of San Jose; Natasha Blum Founder & Principal Director, Research & Strategy at Blumline; Matthew Lipka, Federal Public Policy Lead for Nuro; and Connor French, General Counsel at Zipline International.

The biggest takeaway from our lively discussion was just how complicated it is to deploy robots and drones, and how we are learning about these complications in real time. This was perfectly illustrated with news this week that the University of Pittsburgh is pausing its robot delivery with Starship because the robots may have been blocking people from wheelchairs from accessing the sidewalk. The real world has a way of bringing up complexities that may not have been foreseen while testing or were perhaps just ignored.

As a government employee, the real world is very much where North works. As an employee of the city of San Jose, she has to find a balance between pushing innovation ahead and not leaving people behind. Robots can’t be implemented just because they are cool, or because they get tech bros their burritos faster. She needs to answer questions like who has access to these new services? How will they interact with emergency services? How will they get electrical power? And because all this is so new, there aren’t a lot of answers right now.

Blum, however, is in the business of finding answers. Her Blumline research and design firm helped work on Postmates’ Serve robot by taking an ethnographic approach. Her team went into specific communities to learn what would be considered friendly or off-putting in a robot design. For example: should a robot sit higher and be more visible and sacrifice maneuverability or the other way around? One interesting outcome of Blum’s work could be that robots are customized for each community, featuring different colors or designs that make people more comfortable with the emerging automation in our lives.

Another technology that faces an uphill battle when it comes to getting people on board is drones. As French explained, drones are either associated with battlefield killing machines, tools of a surveillance state, or just the loud, buzzy nuisance that someone flies at the park. This puts the drone industry in a bit of a conundrum. It needs to expand into more benevolent purposes (e.g. medicine and food delivery to remote or hard to reach areas), but it can’t do so until more people are more comfortable with the idea of drones flying over their neighborhoods.

One company already in neighborhoods is Nuro, which has been using its pod-like, low-speed vehicles for grocery delivery in cities like Scottsdale, AZ, and Houston, TX. Lipka pointed out was that even if you work and engage with cities, communities and consumers, Mother Nature can still come along and throw you a curveball. A curveball like haboobs, which are intense dust storms that spring up in places like Arizona. These storms can do all kinds of damage to the sensors and cameras on a Nuro. Learning to interact with the idiosyncrasies associated with different environments is something robot and drone designers must pay attention to as well.

Finally, the big, yet-to-be-answered question from all of this innovation in the drone and robot delivery space is: Who pays for what? As North pointed out, more autonomous robot delivery means fewer people paying for parking, a major source of municipal income. Who pays for the upkeep of roads or new infrastructure like expanded sidewalks or special lanes on roads? The taxpayer? The private company?

This is all new territory, and again, it’s evolving in real-time right in front of us. But discussions like the one from this panel will help more people think about and develop strategies around solving the issues before they happen, rather than trying to fix them after the fact.

Uber Drones to Drop Fancy In-N-Haute Burgers on San Diego

“Uber,” “drones,” and “delivery” are three words we’re going to see a lot of in future. Late last week, word got out that the company has been testing food delivery via drones in San Diego, dropping McDonald’s meals off at set locations.

This week, we learned Uber has also added some fine dining to the drone delivery menu from Juniper & Ivy. The upscale restaurant, which is the brainchild of Richard Blais and Mike Rosen, will make its “In-N-Haute” burger available through Uber Eats for drone delivery once the program kicks off. As the name suggests, item is a $21 take on In-N-Out’s signature “double-double” burger, complete with brioche bun and a fancy take on In-N-Out’s famous “animal-style” sauce.

Once these overpriced burgers hit the air, supplies will reportedly be very limited, with no more than a dozen orders available on any given evening, according to Sandiagoville.com.

For the Uber delivery program, food isn’t dropped via drone directly on your doorstep. Rather, the drone flies it to a set drop-off location where an Uber Eats driver will retrieve it and take it the rest of the way. As my colleague Chris Albrecht pointed out when he wrote about the program last week, “This may seem overly complicated, but Uber says a drone can travel 1.5 miles in 7 minutes versus 21 minutes by ground. So a drone could fly past city congestion to shave off delivery time, even with a pick-up car involved.”

Shaving time off the delivery process will be especially important for expensive burgers that could go cold very quickly while in transit.

The In-N-Haute will be Juniper & Ivy’s only menu item available for drone delivery once Uber’s program kicks off, which will be in either late summer or early fall 2019. No word yet as to whether the restaurant will add more items as Uber’s delivery programs gets its legs.

What will be most interesting about this test is whether people will actually pay $21 (plus delivery fees and tip) to get a high-end burger delivered and, more important, if they’d do it on a regular basis. That’s presumably why Uber’s chosen to test its drone deliveries via two extremes: haute cuisine and fast food. Whichever is more successful in terms of both quality of the food when it finally arrives at your door step as well as overall customer satisfaction with the experience, will tell Uber a lot about where to bet its hand in the upcoming drone delivery race.

Zomato Acquires TechEagle Innovations for Drone Delivery of Food in India

Restaurant discovery and food delivery app Zomato announced yesterday that it has acquired drone developer and fellow Indian startup, TechEagle Innovations. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Zomato currently works with 75,000 restaurants to deliver food in 100 cities in India. With the TechEagle acquisition, Zomato plans to build out a network for aerial food delivery in its home country. Food delivery is playing an increasingly important role for the company, and has jumped to 65 percent of Zomato’s revenue in December from 35 percent back in January of this year.

Now the company is looking to take its food delivery business sky high. Literally.

In a press announcement (courtesy of The Hindu Times), Zomato Founder and CEO Deepinder Goyal said, “We are currently at the early stage of aerial innovations and are taking baby steps towards building a tomorrow wherein users can expect a drone to deliver the food they ordered online. We believe that robots powering the last mile delivery is an inevitable part of the future and hence is going to be a significant area of investment for us.”

Goyal’s words come just a couple of months after it was uncovered that Uber wants to greatly accelerate its own drone food delivery ambitions for Uber Eats, potentially coming to market as soon as 2021. And this summer, Amazon re-emerged in the drone delivery discussion with a patent for in-flight recharging of drones.

But up until this point, Uber and Amazon have been all talk–with good reason. Here in the U.S., regulations around drone and commercial drone operations have yet to be defined. Issues around where drones can fly, safety measures, noise ordinances and even infrastructure still need to be worked out. I’m not familiar with regulation in India, but Quartz reports that a pizzeria launched delivery by drone four years ago, only to have it abruptly halted by local authorities over permissions and security threats.

Four years is a long time in the tech world, and Zomato seems to be undaunted. Even if it is just “baby steps” at this point, the TechEagle acquisition is a concrete move towards food delivery flying overhead. Success in India, however, won’t guarantee global success, as Zomato will still have to navigate the patchwork of drone laws that will emerge in each country.

Amazon Patent Points to In-Flight Recharging For Delivery Drones

Ever since Jeff Bezos teased the idea of drone deliveries on 60 Minutes in 2013, the tech world has been abuzz with the idea. At the time Bezos said that the reality of drone deliveries wasn’t there yet, but he thought it just might be in 4-5 years.

Based on when Bezos made that prediction, that’s about now, and from the looks of it Amazon’s been working hard on ideas to make drone delivered milk a reality.

One of the limiting factors for drone delivery has been battery life. High-quality drones usually can stay in the air for only 30 minutes, and the longer a drone has to recharge, the less packages a fleet can deliver.

Not surprisingly, Amazon has been thinking about this and one of the ideas they’ve come up to ensure you can get your drone-delivered milk is to create flying delivery-bots that recharge…while still in the air. The concept explained in their just-issued patent is similar to that of a wind turbine, but instead of giant propellers the drones will have on-board propellers that spin to generate energy. The patent also describes how the the propellers are adjustable to maximize energy generation and that energy would be created both by windflow and kinetic (in-motion) energy.

The above graphic shows the concept of how the drone will monitors flight paths to find higher-wind flight paths to ensure maximal energy generation. The drone will both change flight path and as well as adjust the energy-generating propellers to make sure they are generating both the most wind-generated and kinetic energy as possible.

The concept of energy generating drones isn’t entirely new. Researchers have been discussing the idea of using tethered drones to produce energy through the use of small mini-wind turbines on board for a couple years, but the concept have largely centered around how drones could basically act as a windmill replacement.  What’s novel about Amazon’s idea is that the energy generation concept appears to be focused on how to recharge the on-board battery to ensure longer flight time as well as higher overall in-air utilization.

No word on when we’ll see Amazon’s energy-generating drones, but if Bezos had his way, they might just be around the corner.

Food Tech News Roundup: Google Groceries, Icelandic Drones, and More “Bleeding” Vegan Burgers

What a week! We just wrapped up our first ever Smart Kitchen Europe event in Dublin. It was a whirlwind few days jam-packed with content and networking as foodtech innovators from across the continent got together to forge the future of food tech. If you’re curious, get to know the winner of our SKS Europe startup showcase, and read up on some smart ktichen news that dropped on the show floor. And of course, if you want to connect with many of the innovators from SKS Europe as well as a whole bunch more in person, make sure you’re at our flagship event in Seattle come October.

But enough about us — here’s a list of the some of the food tech news stories that snagged our interest this week. Perfect for reading over a second cup of coffee while fighting jet lag.

Photo: Naturl’i Foods.

Sainsbury’s to add plant-based “bleeding” burger to meat section
British retail giant Sainsbury’s announced this week that it will debut a “bleeding” plant-based burger in June 27th in 400 locations. In the spirit of the Impossible Burger or Moving Mountains, the patty is meant to look, smell, cook, and taste like a beef burger in an attempt to woo flexitarians who are trying to reduce their meat consumption but don’t want to compromise on flavor. The plant-based burger, made by Danish brand Naturli’ Foods, will be sold alongside its beef counterparts in the meat section. This announcement comes not long after Tesco, another large U.K.-based grocery chain, released the news that it would carry Beyond Burgers in their shops beginning in July of this year.

 

Photographer: Arnaldur Halldorsson/Bloomberg

Iceland amps up drone deliveries in Reykjavik
Aha, Iceland’s largest online marketplace, is slated to expand the number of drones it flies through Reykjavik over the next two years. That’s right, expand — this would be in addition to the limited drone trial they launched last year with Israeli company Flytrex last year.

According to the BBC, the drones could be used to speedily shuttle everything from pizzas to organs destined for transplant — as long as they’re below the maximum weight of 3kg (6lb, 9oz). Their results will no doubt be critical for companies like UberEats, who are also piloting drone delivery programs.

Photo: Clearly Kombucha.

Molson Coors acquires California-based Kombucha brand
Kombucha, a non-alcoholic fermented tea beverage with purported gut health benefits, is not for everyone. But it appears that it’s certainly for Molson Coors, who recently acquired California-based brand Clearly Kombucha. The kombucha brand was founded in 2010 and will become part of Molson Coors’ craft and specialty import division, Tenth and Blake.

According to Grand View Research, the global kombucha market is expected to reach $4.46 billion by 2024. Lately, Molson Coors has been investing in non-alcoholic beverages; last year they purchased a minority stake in Bhakti, a Colorado-based chai tea company.

Photo: MiAlgae

Scottish agtech company raises £500k
MiAlgae, a Scottish company that turns algae into nutrient-dense animal and fish feed, raised £500k ($665k) from backers including Equity Gap, SIB and Edinburgh University’s Old College, reported the U.K. Business Angels Association. The algae is grown using co-products from the Scottish whiskey distillation process (yum), and is high in omega-3 and other nutrients. As it’s made from a byproduct, the feed also has a low environmental footprint, which is critical as our global demand for, and production of, meat and fish continues to grow.

 

Photo: ndb_photo via Flickr.

Google to sell groceries through Home and Assistant platforms in France
Earlier this week Google announced a joint venture with French grocery chain Carrefour. According to Bloomberg, the retailer said that this partnership marks the first time in France that fresh food will be marketed through Google’s platforms. French shoppers will be able to buy grocery products through Google Home and Google Assistant by 2019. This comes a little more than a month after Google unveiled Duplex, which allows Google Assistant to have surprisingly realistic phone conversations to do things like make restaurant reservations. We’ll see if this move can make Google Home/Assistant a competitor with Amazon’s Alexa, who already partnered with U.K. retailers for voice-controlled grocery shopping.

Food Tech News: Celebrity Meal Kits, Beer Delivery, and UberEats Drones

This was a pretty thrilling week for food-related innovation in big data and AI. We wrote about a patent that lets Facebook see inside your fridge and recommend personalized recipes. Google debuted its Duplex technology, which allows it to hold freakishly realistic-sounding phone conversations (listen to it make a restaurant reservation, it’s insane). Perhaps most importantly of all, we wrote about a man who cracked the code for perfect chocolate chip cookies.

And now it’s time for our weekly food tech news roundup. We’ve got stories featuring clean meat labeling, drones, beer delivery, and Chrissy Teigen — let’s dive in:

Photo: Wikipedia.

Uber tests food delivery drone
UberEats has launched a trial program in San Diego testing food delivery via drone, reported Bloomberg. The world’s largest food delivery program could now theoretically drop off your pad thai in as little as five minutes, according to UberEats CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. Of course that’s presuming that the food you’re ordering is already made, but still — that’s quite a bit speedier than even the fastest average food delivery wait time (from, you guessed it, UberEats).

 

Photo: Blue Apron.

Blue Apron teams up with Chrissy Teigen
Just a week after meal kit service Blue Apron announced they were putting their wares on Costco shelves, they revealed more news: they’re collaborating with model/cookbook author/Instagram celebrity Chrissy Teigen on a six-week lineup of recipes and ingredient boxes. The series will start on June 4th and, despite their launch into retail, will only be available via online delivery.

 

Photo: Pizza Hut.

Pizza Hut expands beer delivery
Pizza Hut launched a test program in Phoenix in December to deliver beer and wine alongside their cheesy crust-stuffed pies. Now they’re rolling out that test program in over 100 locations in Arizona and California, with plans to continue expansion later this month. It’s also adding beer partners; the original test was with Anheuser-Busch, but the pizza chain has reportedly added MillerCoors as a partner in brews.

 


Congress might approve lab-grown meat regulation
Quartz reported that a proposed spending bill approved by a congressional subcommittee includes a provision that would give the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) the power to regulate how lab-grown meat is labeled and inspected. It’ll go next to the full, 46-member House Agriculture Committee, and, if passed, would have huge implications for a hotly-contested issue: the labeling of cultured meat.

Did we miss any interesting, thought-provoking food tech stories from the week? Tell us in the comments or tweet us @TheSpoonTech.

DoorDash Hiring for new “Moonshot Initiatives” Like Drones and Robots

When DoorDash closed its $535 million Series D round in March, we wondered if that meant more robot delivery vehicles were on the way. Based on a job listing by the company, it looks like we will, and possibly some drones and self-driving cars too boot.

The job listing is for a Software Engineer, Special Projects. And according to the posting they are “forming a new team at DoorDash dedicated to tackling big bets and moonshot initiatives. Think self driving cars, robotics, drones, chatbots, etc.”

The company is “looking for entrepreneurs to join the founding team,” and the role reports directly to the Co-founder (doesn’t say which one). It goes on to say that the person hired will “Build the 10x ideas from the ground up e.g. robotics, drones, next-gen dispatch, ML-chatbots, strategic partnerships, etc.”

DoorDash has already used robots from Marble for delivery in certain San Francisco neighborhoods. Moving some of that R&D in-house could mean the company is looking to build its own, customized version of one.

The listing doesn’t have a posted date, so we don’t know exactly how long they’ve been searching for such a role. We reached out to DoorDash for a comment, but didn’t hear back in time for publication. We will update this post when we hear back from the company.

A little less than a month ago, DoorDash expanded beyond restaurant delivery and into groceries with a partnership with Walmart in Atlanta. DoorDash is basically powering the logistics and delivery as more of a while label for Walmart in that instance. With 10 percent of U.S. consumers now regularly buying groceries online, getting into that category is a big opportunity. But it also brings bigger competitors, namely Amazon, which is a master of logistics and delivery. DoorDash will need to be innovative as it looks to possibly take on Bezos and company.

DoorDash COO Christopher Payne will be speaking at our Smart Kitchen Summit in October. Hopefully he’ll bring robot or drone or a robot piloting a drone with him.

How Starship’s Hub & Spoke Robot Delivery Model Could Change Food Delivery

As semi-autonomous delivery robots wind their way through the streets of Greenwich, a borough of London, England, delivering take-out meals to local diners, we are witness to a small glimpse of how such technology will forever change the food ecosystem.

While Starship Technologies’ partnership with Just Eat, a home delivery service connecting consumers to their favorite restaurants, has received a significant amount of media attention, robotic delivery has far broader—and perhaps more socially significant—possibilities. Starship’s hub-and-spoke vision—that is a scenario where large amounts of goods—in this case, food—are taken to a central location after which an army of semi-autonomous robots take the wares the last quarter mile to individual homes.

Two obvious scenarios of this application of Starship’s innovation are home grocery delivery and bringing needed fresh food to a growing number of food deserts (areas outside the logistical reach of farms and farmers markets). For the home grocery startups such as Instacart, robots allow workers to focus more on careful curation than transporting sacks of produce, canned goods and other staples to local residents. Much the way newspapers set up substations where the daily papers are taken in bundles to individual districts where they are sorted and doled out to kids on bikes, supermarket chains or other food distribution can create a value-chain efficiency that benefits their bottom lines while providing a valuable service.

It’s clear that such a scenario is in Starship Technologies’ plans. In early September, the company announced a partnership with Mercedes-Benz to develop “robot vans” which could bring the hub-and-spoke model to life. According to its press release, Starship said it will work with the German car manufacturer to build a transportation system in which specially-designed Sprinter vans will hold up to eight delivery robots. Based on location density and consumer needs, the vans will make their rounds dropping off, and later picking up, individual robotic delivery agents. While not mentioned in the release, a backend with carefully programmed robust logistical software and a “service center” where multiple robots can be simultaneously monitored will be needed.

A few enhancements would be needed to the current robot agent to truly optimize its capabilities. According to Starship Technologies, the semi-autonomous unit can hold up to 22 pounds and uses the insulation provided by the restaurant or its delivery service. In order to deal with larger deliveries—such as supplies to prep kitchens– or perishables, greater capacity and commercial insulation will need to be added to the units.

Moving from commercial needs to the greater good, the creation of a system to cut down on the growing number of food deserts will require more hands on deck. One of those additional hands might come in the form of delivery drones from the likes of Amazon, already in the business of efficient home delivery. The Seattle-based retail giant prides itself in leaving no address “unaddressable” when it comes to getting goods and services to the far reaches of the planet.

As with previous innovations, advances in food technology—particularly in logistics—first movers don’t always have an advantage. Lurking in the background—some not so subtly—are key players such as incumbents UPS and FedEx, as well as newcomers to the asynchronous delivery transport world including Uber and Lyft. In short order, autonomous vehicles of every shape and size will be in plentiful supply; how entrepreneurs in the food industry deploy them will separate the winners from the losers.