- Pizza Hut will use drones to drop multiple pizza orders at government-approved landing zones, where they will be collected by delivery drivers who will take them to the customers’ homes.
- “It’s not realistic to think we’re going to see drones flying all over the sky, dropping pizzas into everyone’s back yards anytime soon,” Ido Levanon, the managing director of Dragontail Systems, Ltd., said.
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Drone pizza delivery is no fly-by-night operation. In fact, Pizza Hut will shine a spotlight on it in Israel this summer and test just how well a drone system could work.
As the Wall Street Journal has reported, Pizza Hut Israel plans to give drone delivery a shot in June. However, the drones won’t be fluttering up to doorsteps and freaking out the neighborhood dogs just yet. Instead, the company will drop multiple pizza orders at government-approved landing zones, where they will be collected by delivery drivers who will take them the customers’ homes.
“Drone delivery is a sexy thing to talk about, but it’s not realistic to think we’re going to see drones flying all over the sky, dropping pizzas into everyone’s back yards anytime soon,” Ido Levanon, the managing director of Dragontail Systems, Ltd., told the WSJ.
Dragontail Systems will coordinate the drone trial for Pizza Hut. The chain will test the drones from one restaurant in northern Israel within a designated “air bubble” that measures about 50 square miles. Only a limited number of orders will be delivered in the test run.
Levanon told the WSJ that flying pizza deliveries to customers’ doorsteps would require a lot of drones and battery charging. “We came up with what we feel is a much more practical solution,” he said.
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However, Udi Shamai, president of Pizza Hut Israel, told the WSJ that drones would allow the test store to deliver to about 7,000 additional households that otherwise can’t get delivery.
Currently, a pizza drone can only carry about five pounds of cargo, which amounts to two pies and a bottle of Coke, Shamai said in the interview. “We’re hoping by June they’ll increase the weight” to 22 pounds, he said.
The Pizza Hut drone delivery test is part of something much larger, according to the Jerusalem Post. Ultimately, Israel wants to create a nationwide drone network for commercial deliveries, medical transport and urban air mobility. If successful, it could “completely transform the nation’s transportation infrastructure,” the Post says.
