Flytrex, an Israeli-owned startup, is currently making drone food and Walmart deliveries in North Carolina. The company is now planning to expand to Texas, where it will be serving residents in the Dallas-Fort Worth suburb of Granbury.
Flytrex claims to be able to deliver food within five minutes. Founded in 2013, the first drone deliveries by the company were in Iceland in 2017. Flytrex raised $40 million last year and used the capital investment to expand its service area. However, the company’s focus will remain in suburban neighborhoods based on their business model assessments.
Using Flytrex is like using other food delivery services. Customers use an app to look at menus and place orders. Flytrex employees will load the items into a drone delivery box. The drone then flies to the customer’s location and lowers the package to the ground in the customer’s backyard.
One limitation is that the delivery location must be within a mile of where the package is loaded. However, this limitation is not due to the technology but FAA regulations. The FAA may modify these regulations to make drone delivery more feasible in the future.
Flytrex has partnered with the Dallas-based parent company Brinker International, which owns Chili’s, Maggiano’s, and two carryout brands.
Amazon has been touting its Prime Air, a system that Amazon claims will safely deliver packages within 30 minutes. Amazon may be lagging as a full-scale launch of Prime Air has yet to happen. Wings, owned by Alphabet, delivered 200,000 packages as of February 2022. Its core business is in Australia, where it partners with chains such as KFC.
Meanwhile, Zipline, which provides medical supplies in Africa, has made over 225,000 commercial deliveries. These numbers are minimal compared to the figures for ground-based parcel delivery services such as UPS and Amazon’s fleet. According to estimates, Amazon delivers about 1.6 million packages per day.
Now is an ideal time for introducing drone delivery technology, as in the advent of the pandemic, more consumers have become accustomed to having groceries and other goods delivered. Many people now work from home, so picking up some milk or a meal on the drive home is no longer feasible.
Drone delivery companies like Flytrex address the desire of modern consumers for convenience and speed while also supposedly lowering road congestion and increasing overall public safety.
According to a press release, Flytrex CEO Yariv Bash stated that he plans to expand the delivery service to nationwide coverage eventually. He claims it is already preferred to other options in North Carolina and looks forward to doing big things in Texas.