By now, most people have heard about Amazon’s plans to deliver packages to the home using a drone. Slightly less well known (that is, 1.5 million views on YouTube) is the PR stunt published online almost a year ago by a Dominos Pizza restaurant in the UK. Francesco’s Pizzeria, located in Mumbai, liked the idea and decided they would do their own stunts.
Well, less a stunt and more a test run for pizza-delivery-by-drone.
“We successfully carried out a test-delivery by sending a pizza to a customer located 1.5 km away from our outlet on May 11,” Francesco’s Pizzeria chief executive Mikhel Rajani told NDTV.
With the help of an auto engineering friend, Rajani used a quadcopter to deliver the pizza to a customer in a high rise building and recorded the whole experience which you can watch below.
Rajani admitted this was only a test run, but believes that the practice of drone-based pizza delivery is only a few short years away. There are still limitations, such as battery life and payload capacity, but there are teams of people all over the world that will have these issues resolved by the time government regulations are in place (apparently, India is also waiting on the FAA to publish their rules).
Check out the video which, based on the first few shots, should be renamed Mission Drone-Possible: Pizza Protocol.
Alan is serial entrepreneur, active angel investor, and a drone enthusiast. He co-founded DRONELIFE.com to address the emerging commercial market for drones and drone technology. Prior to DRONELIFE.com, Alan co-founded Where.com, ThinkingScreen Media, and Nurse.com. Recently, Alan has co-founded Crowditz.com, a leader in Equity Crowdfunding Data, Analytics, and Insights. Alan can be reached at alan(at)dronelife.com