By Rick Hynum
If you’ll forgive the OG Superman reference, folks in Wylie, Texas, will soon believe that a pizza can fly.
Little Caesars, whose tech cred has surged this year, has begun offering drone delivery to customers in that Dallas suburb in a partnership with Flytrex, a leader in autonomous drone delivery. The deliveries are powered by Flytrex’s new Sky2 drone, and, importantly, customers can receive up to two large pizzas and sodas in a single delivery—“a first for on-demand food delivery by air,” Flytrex said in a press release.
It’s a breakthrough because it makes Little Caesars the first pizza chain that can fulfill larger, family-sized orders, even including sides like Crazy Puffs. Flytrex aims to expand across the Dallas-Fort Worth area and bring the service to additional Little Caesars stores in the region and, eventually, to other markets as well.
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Drone delivery is just the latest high-tech advance for Little Caesars. The company also introduced online ordering via ChatGPT earlier this month. Additionally, the brand now uses AI-powered forecasting to predict demand for pizzas across its multichannel marketplace, including walk-in customers, app orders and third-party orders.
The Sky2 drone can carry up to 8.8 pounds, the largest carrying capacity of any food delivery drone available today, Flytrex said. With a range of up to four miles and support for remote pickups directly from restaurant locations, orders can be collected faster and arrive hotter, showing up in an average of 4.5 minutes from takeoff to delivery, Flytrex said.
“Flytrex is laser-focused on making on-demand food delivery by drone a reality for everyday families,” Amit Regev, CEO and co-founder of Flytrex, stated in the press release. “A big part of advancing this market is making sure people can get the food they actually want, when they want it. Until now, drones simply weren’t capable of delivering a full family meal. The Sky2 changes that.”
The technology also introduces a first-of-its-kind direct integration with Little Caesars’ ordering systems, allowing orders placed via the Flytrex app to flow directly into Little Caesars’ existing POS systems.
“The service is already live,” Regev told PMQ via email. “It’s available seven days a week, from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. Customers within roughly a three-mile radius of the Little Caesars store in Wylie can download the Flytrex app, place an order for drone delivery, and receive their pizza in their backyard within minutes.”
Trish Heusel, vice president of innovation at Little Caesars, said the ability to deliver a full family meal by drone is “a major leap forward and a clear example of how we’re pushing the boundaries of convenience, speed and accessibility in our category.”
Courtesy of Flytrex, here are more details for all the drone nerds out there: “Among its key features, the Sky2 utilizes an octocopter configuration with eight motors for full in-flight redundancy, a dual-battery architecture, and GNSS with RTK for centimeter-level navigation accuracy. Its AI-enabled flight logic continuously monitors and manages flight operations to ensure safe, reliable performance on every delivery.”
Regev told PMQ that Flytrex has been offering “autonomous-first” drone delivery across the DFW metro area for the past two years. Pizza, though, proved to be a bit problematic. “Earlier versions of our system had more limited payload capacity, which made large pizza deliveries challenging,” he said. Thanks to the Sky2 drone’s capacity for two 16” pizzas, “we’re now able to fully support the pizza delivery use case.”
“Partnering with Little Caesars Pizza, a brand known for continuously innovating and finding new ways to enhance the customer experience, was a natural fit,” Regev added. “Together, we’re bringing fast, fully autonomous, backyard pizza delivery to customers, straight from the sky.
The Little Caesars partnership and the introduction of the Sky2 are the latest milestones in a breakout year for Flytrex. In the last 12 months, the company secured investment from Uber as part of a strategic partnership to fulfill Uber Eats orders and partnered with DoorDash to launch drone delivery in Dallas. Crucially, it has received FAA approval for Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) operations, a sticking point for drone delivery. And it has collaborated with Wing, a Google company, to become the first commercial drone operators in the U.S. to implement automated flight coordination in shared airspace.
Related: Why Aren’t Drones Delivering Pizza in the U.S. Yet? An Expert Weighs In
Rick Hynum is PMQ Pizza’s editor in chief.
