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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Wing

Serve Robotics Partners With Drone Delivery Specialist Wing To Pair Sidewalk With Aerial Delivery

Serve Robotics Inc. and Wing Aviation announced a pilot program this week that will combine their delivery methods to extend the reach of restaurant deliveries across densely populated urban areas. According to the announcement, Serve’s robots will collect orders from restaurant curbsides and transport them to Wing’s AutoLoader hubs, where Wing’s drones will carry the packages to customers up to six miles away.

Serve Robotics spun out of Uber in 2021 and has since worked with the likes of Uber Eats and 7-Eleven. According to the company, its robots have completed tens of thousands of deliveries in urban markets. For its part, Wing, a subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet, says it has racked up 400,000 commercial deliveries across three continents, working with food delivery partners like DoorDash.

This announcement is interesting because it represents the first integration of sidewalk and aerial delivery. I’ll be watching if this thing ever moves out of pilot since, as drone delivery has moved significantly slower in terms of rollout than many providers had hoped, and combining it with sidewalk delivery adds another potential complication that could trip up cautious delivery operators and restaurants.

However, if Serve can nail handoffs at Drone pick-up areas as suggested in the video (the choppy editing looks a bit suspect to me), I can see this becoming a real peanut butter and jelly combo for quick deployment of food.

Watch as a Serve Sidewalk Robot Hands Off Food Delivery to a Wing Drone

Wing to Hit 100,000th Drone Delivery

Wing, the drone delivery spin-off from Google X, announced yesterday that it will pass 100,000 customer deliveries “in the next few days.” The milestone is another stepping stone for the nascent drone delivery sector, as it inches closer to more widespread adoption around the globe.

In its announcement, Wing said that 50,000 of those deliveries were to customers in Logan, Australia over the last eight months. Wing added that it made almost 4,500 deliveries in the first week of August, which translated into a Logan resident received a drone delivery approximately every 30 seconds during Wing’s service hours. Wing also shared that over the past year its drones have dropped off more than 10,000 cups of coffee, 1,700 snack packs, and 1,200 “hot chooks” (what Australians call roasted chicken).

Drones are actually a pretty good technology for food delivery, and have the potential to radically alter the delivery landscape. Drones are fast, arriving at their destination in minutes so hot food stays hot. They can reduce traffic on the road by replacing full-sized cars making deliveries. And in the age of COVID, they can provide contactless delivery.

We’ve already seen startups like Manna make thousands of deliveries in Galway, Ireland. Here in the U.S., Kroger started piloting its first drone delivery in Ohio, and Walmart has partnered with Flytrex for drone deliveries and invested in on-demand drone delivery startup DroneUp.

Despite all these advances, there are still plenty of regulatory hurdles for drone deliveries to overcome before they can truly scale on a global basis. Drones need flight paths cleared, specific safety measures installed, and citizens need reassurances that they aren’t being spied upon (the CEO of Manna told me that this is a top concern for people).

Those concerns, however are steadily being worked out and as Wing and other companies are showing, drone delivery going mainstream is not that far off.