Will drones deliver your next hot food order?

Meal delivery is a luxury city dwellers take for granted – but more options are opening up for non-urban residents.

Boasting nearly 700,000 islands collectively, Sweden, Norway and Finland are home to the most islands in the world, their coastlines dotted by archipelagos that have shaped their history and culture.

While a number of the islands are accessible by ferry and bridge to residents of the region’s cities, there’s one thing locals are often missing: hot food delivery to their door, a service their city cousins probably take for granted.

But Norwegian start-up Aviant wants to change that, by establishing the region’s first food delivery service by drone – starting on the Swedish island of Värmdö.

Värmdö is just eight miles (13km) from Stockholm as the crow flies, and accessible by car, bus and ferry. But its population of around 46,000 – rising to up to 100,000 in the summer – has few hot food delivery options.

During a video call, Aviant co-founder and CEO, Lars Erik Fagernæs, shows me a map of the islands closest to Stockholm.

“All of the white and blue squares are where (delivery services) Foodora and Wolt have a service, and all of the black squares are where they don’t,” says Mr Fagernæs, who is based in the Norwegian city of Trondheim.

“As you can see on the map, there are 87,000 people who don’t have access to a home delivery service. These people live in what you would call suburbs, and would want to order takeaway food, but they just don’t have an option.”

Since February, though, residents of Gustavsberg, the main town on Värmdö, and surrounding areas, have been able to order freshly made burgers from Scandinavian chain Bastard Burgers directly to their door via drone, using Aviant’s technology.

The cost of delivery is comparable to that of a car or bike service, as drones take out the cost of the driver.

At the moment Aviant is in a “beta phase” – only delivering 10 items a week, while they check everything works.

But the plan is to scale up as the year goes on.

Aviant is also set to launch a similar service on the Norwegian peninsula of Nesodden – just four miles in distance from Oslo, but a 29-mile road journey. Mr Fagernæs demonstrates once again on a map.

“All the white is where you don’t currently have a food delivery service. So it’s about 100,000 people that’s going to now have access to home delivery that didn’t have it before,” he says.

It hasn’t been a straightforward process to perfect, Mr Fagernæs admits, as several trials were needed to ensure the food stayed hot and fresh during the maximum flight time of up to 10 minutes, over a radius of up to six miles.

“We have been testing this for three years, and in the beginning, there were a lot of soggy fries,” he recalls. “But we have improved the isolated container the burger goes in, and now we know it arrives warm, even in the winter months.

“People go crazy for it. They call their neighbors and their grandma. They think it’s like a UFO delivering their food.”

Mr Fagernæs hopes the two pilot services will provide the “recipe”, as he describes it, to embark on a full-scale rollout across Scandinavia, where many communities like those on Värmdö and Nessoden are beholden to their geography. He points back to the map.

“We don’t have huge cities, but these areas are viable for drone delivery, where they are on the border of urban with rural, which is very hard to serve by car, and that is a lot of the population in Scandinavia,” says Mr Fagernæs.

Aviant has identified around 40 bases across Scandinavia to expand to over the next two years, and sees similar geography in Canada, which has over 52,000 islands, and the north eastern region of the US, characterised by lakes, mountains and islands.

And what about the weather. Mr Fagernæs admits high winds will ground the drones occasionally, but expects the service to have 90% uptime.

As for flying drones to deliver food into really remote areas, Aviant is one of a number of drone firms to have tested the waters, but found the numbers did not add up.

Starting in 2022, Aviant delivered Thai, Italian and sushi to residents outside of Trondheim. But that service was ended in August 2023.

Meanwhile, in 2022, UK firm Skyports delivered school meals to children in the Orkney islands, funded by Argyll and Bute Council, and temporarily ran a “fish and chip Fridays” delivery service to the wider community.

Similarly, German firm Wingcopter delivered everyday goods to rural residents in 2023 as part of a government partnership. In China’s eastern Zhejiang province, a local council is funding drone delivery of hot meals to elderly villagers isolated in the mountains.

But continuing these services without a government or corporate sponsor is not commercially viable.

Given the distances, the cost of delivery would be prohibitive for the person ordering, and too much for the outlet providing the food to waive. And, being rural areas, there aren’t enough locals to generate sufficient orders to begin with.

Skyports has, however, been running a drone delivery service with Royal Mail across the Orkneys since 2023, and is looking at how the drones used in that can be repurposed to resurrect the hot meal delivery service, this time for all residents.

“We haven’t yet opened it up to other non-Royal Mail users as it’s currently strictly a Royal Mail service. But absolutely, we can be looking at when those drones aren’t in use, how we could be taking cargo from outlets on the mainland to the islands.

We would have to look at what the premium charged would be, as it will be important to lower the cost. Today we’ve just been focusing on getting the service right before we look at that expansion,” explains Alex Brown, Skyports director.

“You could absolutely make something like that work. The more you could utilise the drone, the better.

“So there are models where you have an anchor customer who’s underwriting that core cost, then you can incrementally bolt on new commercial opportunities to bring in additional revenue, and then a new service for people using it.”

Apart from making the finances stack up, in the UK, commercial drone operators must work closely with the Civil Aviation Authority to designate a segregated air space they can operate in, to avoid collisions with other aircraft, and minimise the risk of a crash to people on the ground.

While this prioritises safety, it makes the UK drone market far more difficult to enter than in Europe, Asia, or Australia, as Skyports’ Mr Brown notes.

Rural operators can, as he explains, make the case that they are operating in atypical air space, or space that isn’t likely to have other aircraft flying in it or many people below, as well as demonstrate that they’re using high tech navigation and hazard detection technology – options Mr Brown says the UK government is becoming increasingly open to, and is encouraging for entrepreneurs in the sector.

“It is getting easier, and to give the UK government credit, they are making good progress,” he says.