Grubhub begins drone delivery tests

Grubhub will test drone delivery of takeout orders for the first time, marking the latest effort from the company to experiment with automation technologies.

The limited three-month pilot program, announced Wednesday in a joint statement with drone delivery company Dexa, includes several caveats. Customers must be located within 2.5 miles of Grubhub parent Wonder Group Inc.’s restaurant location in suburban Green Brook, N.J. Items must also weigh under 4 pounds. After placing an order through the Grubhub app, users will see real-time GPS tracking, estimated arrival notifications and order confirmations.

The service will be available daily starting March 18, from when the store opens at 10:30 a.m. until sunset, according to Grubhub. It aims to complete drone deliveries five to eight minutes after the food is loaded into the autonomous carrier, and within 30 minutes after the order is placed, PJ Poykayil, senior vice president of customer delivery operations at Wonder and Grubhub, said in an interview.

The partnership marks Grubhub’s latest foray into autonomous delivery methods. It already uses sidewalk robots on some U.S. college campuses, completing thousands of those deliveries a day, according to Poykayil. The company is “looking at all points of automation” across its operations, he said, mirroring a similar push at Wonder, the food hall company that bought Grubhub a little over a year ago.

Late last year, Wonder acquired Sweetgreen Inc.’s salad-making robotics unit for $186 million, a deal that would eventually allow Wonder to expand to 100 menu items per location, Bloomberg Businessweek reported in January.

Grubhub is first piloting drone delivery with Wonder in part so that it can run tests with the more than 20 different food types offered through Wonder’s ghost kitchen, Poykayil said. Grubhub will “explore expanding drone delivery to additional restaurant partners” after evaluating learnings from the tests, according to the company.

Like Grubhub’s robot deliveries on campuses, “we are hoping that there’s a parallel there based on our internal data that there are a lot of consumers who would be interested in getting the food fast,” Poykayil said, noting that users save money by not having to tip a human courier.

Throughout the New Jersey program, Dexa flight crew members will help in loading individual orders into cardboard boxes that hang below the company’s DE-2020 autonomous drones, which will then fly at 400 feet at 40 miles an hour, said Dexa Chief Executive Beth Flippo in the same interview. The drone determines the safest location to place the delivery box from the order’s destination address, which is usually the customer’s front yard, she said.

Upon arrival, the drone will get within 10 feet of the ground, slowly lower the box with a winch and let it go before flying back up and departing, she added. While the drones fly themselves, Dexa has an air traffic control team in Dayton, Ohio — where the company is based — to remotely monitor all flight activity.

Competing apps have also ramped up testing of drone deliveries in recent years, even though they are limited in scale. The Federal Aviation Administration tightly regulates airspace, and Dexa is among a handful of companies cleared to fly drones that go beyond the operator’s visual range.

DoorDash Inc. and Uber Technologies Inc. have partnered with another company, Flytrex Inc., to offer drone delivery in some markets. DoorDash also works with Alphabet Inc.’s Wing to test and provide drone delivery in some parts of Charlotte, N.C., southwest Virginia and Australia.

Lung writes for Bloomberg.