By Brian Hernandez
As CEO and co-founder of Hylio, Arthur Erickson spends his days building autonomous drones that help farmers apply fertilizer with incredible precision. But years before Amazon made drone delivery a subject of household conversation, he was already flying real deliveries in Costa Rica—including pizzas.
As someone who’s spent more than two decades in the pizza business and flies drones as a hobby, I had to know: Is pizza delivery by drone actually the future, or are we all just chasing the opening scene from Ready Player One?
The answer surprised me. According to Erickson, drones themselves aren’t the problem—the technology has largely caught up with the idea. As he explained in the latest episode of Peel: A PMQ Pizza Podcast, that’s slowing things down are regulations, infrastructure and the enormous investment required to prove the system is safe enough for everyday neighborhoods.
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Of course, pizza and drones have crossed paths before. Domino’s, Pizza Hut, Little Caesars and others have all made headlines over the years with promotional flights, pilot programs and limited-market tests. Most were carefully controlled demonstrations or small-scale trials designed to prove the concept rather than replace the neighborhood delivery driver. Pizza has even made the journey to space—Pizza Hut famously sent a specially prepared pie to Russian cosmonaut Yuri Usachov aboard the International Space Station in 2001 as part of a publicity campaign.
More recently, drone delivery has quietly moved beyond marketing stunts. Companies like Wing, Flytrex and Amazon Prime Air continue expanding real-world delivery networks, and pizza is beginning to join the conversation. This spring, Anthony Pizzi, founder of The New Jersey Pizza Alliance held the inaugural xPizza Day at The Columbia Inn in Montville, New Jersey, featuring an autonomous pizza delivery by Dexa, showcasing what organizers called the first drone pizza delivery of its kind in the Northeast. Meanwhile, Flytrex has begun delivering full-size Little Caesars pizzas in Texas, while Papa Johns is also exploring drone delivery through its partnership with Wing.
We know drone delivery is feasible. The bigger question, Erickson said, is how long it’ll take before the economics and regulations catch up to the technology.
Brian Hernandez: A lot of people assume the technology isn’t ready yet. Are they wrong?
Arthur Erickson: We’re much farther along in the technology than most people realize. We were doing fully autonomous deliveries, including pizzas, back in 2016 and 2017. We weren’t manually flying those drones. We were supervising them and had the ability to intervene if necessary, but the flights themselves were autonomous. Obstacle avoidance, route planning and autonomous navigation are all things that already exist today.
Hernandez: So what’s actually standing in the way?
Erickson:Â Economics and regulations. One drone delivering one pizza can absolutely save money, but there are a lot of development costs, legal costs and infrastructure costs that have to be overcome first. Then regulators have to be comfortable with drones operating safely over neighborhoods and populated areas.
Related: Liftoff! Pizza Chain Achieves a First in Drone Delivery
Hernandez: Will restaurants eventually own their own drone fleets?
Erickson: Probably not. I think you’ll see delivery networks develop first. Large logistics providers will build the infrastructure, and restaurants will plug into those networks. That’s probably the most practical path forward.
Hernandez: What does drone delivery look like 10 or 15 years from now?
Erickson: I don’t think it’ll just be individual drones flying single orders across town. You’ll probably see larger drones acting almost like motherships, transporting smaller delivery drones into neighborhoods where they can complete individual deliveries. Combined with advances in mapping, automation and autonomous navigation, you end up with a delivery ecosystem capable of handling far more orders than today’s systems. That’s where I think the technology is heading.
Hernandez: Your day job isn’t pizza delivery—it’s helping farmers use fertilizer more efficiently. How quickly do higher fertilizer costs affect restaurants?
Erickson: Faster than people think. Most restaurant businesses aren’t sitting on huge inventories. Once existing inventory moves through the system, higher input costs start showing up pretty quickly. That affects everyone from farmers to grocery stores to restaurants.
Hernandez: Can drone technology actually help reduce those costs?
Erickson: By deploying our drones for precision agriculture, we’re solving a lot of problems at once. It’s cheaper, better, faster, stronger, safer. We’re helping farmers use fewer inputs, reduce waste and become more efficient while maintaining yields. That’s been Hylio’s mission from the beginning, and those efficiencies eventually benefit everyone throughout the food supply chain.
Brian Hernandez is PMQ’s associate editor, coordinator of the U.S. Pizza Team and a professed drone nerd.
