By Charlie Pogacar
In 2013, Jeff Bezos predicted Amazon would have a fully operational drone delivery program within five years. Similarly, in 2015, Dave Vos, who headed up Google’s Project Wing, told an audience that Google was aiming to launch drone delivery by 2017.
Neither of those predictions came true. Even now, a decade removed from Bezos’ prediction, most Americans have yet to experience a drone delivery. For those people, drones may have become the 21st century’s flying car: a futuristic fantasy yet to materialize.
That doesn’t mean there hasn’t been progress when it comes to drone delivery. Take a company like Zipline, for example, which has completed more than 1 million successful drone deliveries of everything from healthcare necessities to food and beverage. Some of those deliveries have taken place in the U.S.—the logistics and drone delivery company has partnered with Walmart, for example, in Dallas-Fort Worth. Even Amazon has begun providing drone delivery in select U.S. markets.
Related: Has the Age of Drone Delivery Arrived At Last? This 400-Unit Pizza Chain Says Yes
Indeed, even if it’s taken longer than some would have projected, drones are now poised to reshape the world of pizza delivery. In late 2024, or perhaps early 2025, Jet’s Pizza will begin offering drone delivery from a single store outside of Detroit. Pagliacci Pizza, a 25-store chain in the Seattle metro area, has said it will soon offer drone delivery. Both brands are partnering with the same company, Zipline, to enhance their respective pizza delivery programs.
Still, all of that might feel far away to those Americans who have yet to see a drone deliver anything. But for those in the “I’ll-believe-it-when-I-see-it” camp, it’s important to note that something big happened last fall—something that is primed to shake up food delivery in the U.S.
In September 2023, Zipline was granted permission by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to fly autonomous drones “beyond visual line of sight” (BVLOS) across the country. This means exactly what it sounds like: For the first time, Zipline drones can be operated in U.S. airspace without the drone pilot or visual observers being able to see it with their own eyes.
For some time, BVLOS permission was the holy grail to companies with drone delivery aspirations. Without it, any drone delivery system would be severely limited if not outright ineffective. For Zipline, the FAA clearance was a massive win. (Note: In May 2024, Amazon received similar clearance).
“We applaud the FAA for taking a major step to integrate autonomous drone delivery into the airspace,” said Okeoma Moronu, Zipline’s head of global aviation regulatory affairs, in a statement. “This will enable more commerce, new economic opportunities and greater access for millions of Americans.”
It’s fair to assume not everyone in the world of pizza heard this news, but the announcement will nonetheless have a profound impact on the industry. It was, in effect, a greenlight for brands like Jet’s Pizza and Pagliacci Pizza to launch drone delivery services via Zipline.
For years, Zipline specialized in healthcare deliveries. The company’s pilot program was situated in Rwanda, where remote hospitals were difficult to reach via automobile. If a mother in a rural area was losing blood during childbirth, for example, a drone proved to be a far more efficient way of delivering a life-saving transfusion.
Even if a pizza won’t save lives, these same principles apply to food delivery. Because a drone takes a direct line to its destination, the pizza gets there faster. The practice also widens a restaurant’s delivery radius: Zipline says a drone can complete a 10-mile delivery in about 10 minutes.
“Today we use 4,000-pound, gas combustion vehicles driven by humans to do billions of deliveries across the country,” Keller Rinaudo Cliffton, CEO and co-founder of Zipline, pointed out. “It’s expensive, slow and bad for the environment. [The FAA’s] decision means that we can start to transition delivery to solutions that are 10 times as fast, less expensive, [with] zero emission.”
For these reasons, drone delivery was an easy sell for Jet’s Pizza. At a time when food delivery has never been in higher demand, it’s also become increasingly challenging to find cost-efficient ways to deliver pizza.
“The elephant in the room for pizza companies is what to do with the third-party aggregators,” said Aaron Nilsson, chief operating officer at Jet’s Pizza. “I have used a few different words to describe [those companies] in the past…Sometimes I call them frenemies because they do a lot of good for us, but it’s pretty hard to look at the fees we have to pay them.”
“On top of all of that,” Nilsson said, “we always feel that we need to continuously improve the ways we get our great pizza delivered to you, the customer. So when drones came along—and it became clear this could really work—we were like, yeah, totally, let’s do that.”
Partnering with Zipline was attractive to Jet’s Pizza for reasons that go beyond just cost and efficiency, too. From a purely logistical point of view, Zipline had already taken care of details that, for many years, made drone delivery feel like a far-away dream. It’s hard to imagine a pizza company putting together the resources to not only perfect an autonomous drone delivery robot, but then to work with a federal agency to receive clearance to fly them over houses and through shared airspace.
Another significant challenge Zipline mastered was designing a drone delivery system that worked in an urban setting. Zipline’s original drone—the Platform 1, or P1, as the company refers to it—was designed to make long-range deliveries in a rural environment, a practice which it excels at. The P1 can drop off supplies within the area of a single parking space, which works great in a rural or suburban setting, but not so well in, say, downtown Detroit.
Zipline built its more recent Platform 2, or P2, drone specifically with urban deliveries in mind. The P2 “zip,” as it is called, hovers 300 feet in the air while its “droid” descends to the ground to deliver a package. Each P2 zip can carry six to eight pounds, or about two large Jet’s Pizza pies and a couple of sides. The P2’s service radius is 10 miles and can fly up to 24 miles on a single charge. It can deliver to “most any open space” with a radius of just under two feet. And for those asking, “Sure, but how will it perform during an ice storm?” Zipline says the P2 performs quite well even in adverse weather conditions:
“Our Zips are very capable fliers, delivering in rain, wind, thunderstorms, extreme cold and other conditions that would normally slow down automotive transport,” the company notes on its website.
Best of all, at least from Nilsson’s perspective, is the cost of partnering with Zipline. While Nilsson declined to share specific numbers with PMQ, he said the net costs “will probably be in the ballpark of what over-the-road delivery would be.” He also noted that consumers don’t have to tip the drone. “So there’s actually a 20% savings on that order that I think is going to be a draw for a lot of customers,” Nilsson said.
Cost savings won’t be the only draw for consumers, Nilsson observed. There’s also a “wow” factor associated with drones. In Zipline videos depicting its operation in Rwanda, children gather round on a daily basis to witness the miracle of a robot flying through the air. It stands to reason that people will get a thrill out of seeing a drone deliver their food through the air. And, indeed, there are already families receiving Zipline deliveries in the U.S. from companies like Walmart, and the initial “wow” factor is impressive.
“Seeing the customer response to Zipline is mind-blowing,” Rinaudo Cliffton said. “For about seven days they’re in complete amazement…and then by day eight people are completely bored by it. We have families in the U.S. who are placing orders many times a week. They rely on it completely, and it’s normal and boring to them. It’s amazing to see that level of adoption.”
Rinaudo Cliffton paints a rosy picture, but is the average American really ready for drone deliveries? Even if Zipline and Jet’s Pizza work diligently to assuage some consumers’ fears, many Americans are already increasingly on edge when it comes to what they might perceive as invasive technology. In a country where 60% of people think their smartphones are spying on them, should we assume they’ll be perfectly comfortable with a robot landing in their backyard?
Nilsson concedes that public perception is a real battle Jet’s Pizza will need to fight, but he’s not that worried about it. Nobody at Jet’s is living under the impression that by the end of 2024, a fleet of drones will be conducting every Jet’s pizza delivery. But once customers see how frictionless the experience is, they will begin to love it, he believes.
“I think 20% of people could be adopting this within the first two years it’s available,” Nilsson said. “With aggressive promotion, excellent execution, and good consumer training, we will get to 20% of our deliveries within two years.”
