In the near future, when a pizza gets tossed in the air at Pagliacci, it may not come down until it’s delivered.
The Seattle-based pizza chain has signed on with Zipline, a drone delivery platform which hopes to take some land-based vehicles out of the equation and speed the process of getting goods to people’s homes.
Pagliacci is one of three new customers announced Wednesday by Zipline as the company looks to expand U.S. operations and become one of the first to offer commercial drone delivery in Washington state.
Zipline — a graduate of Techstars Seattle in 2011 — already operates a long-range autonomous drone platform that has been used to deliver medical supplies, blood and COVID-19 vaccines in a handful of African nations. The Seattle-based Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has backed such efforts.
The company unveiled its Platform 2 home delivery system in March, promising a quiet, fully-electric machine with a 10-mile radius. It safely hovers 300 feet over a delivery destination and lowers a droid on a tether to gently drop a package weighing six to eight pounds.
“It’s mind blowing to think about how it’s gonna work,” said Matt Galvin, who has been co-owner at Pagliacci, a 44-year-old chain, since 2000. “Having seen it, it’s unbelievably cool.”
But a drone won’t be dropping pizzas on any Seattle doorsteps this weekend or next. Zipline would only say that it will be conducting 10,000 high-volume flight tests using about 100 drones this year, and the first customer deployment of a P2 drone “will follow shortly after that.”
There are significant logistical hurdles to overcome, including Federal Aviation Administration guidelines. The agency said in a statement that “safely integrating drones into the National Airspace System is a key priority for the FAA.” It’s doing that with a number of initiatives and rules, some of which Zipline has already achieved under the BEYOND program, a four-year effort to address unmanned aircraft system challenges.
Zipline said it has received Part 135 certification, which, according to the FAA “is the only path for small drones to carry the property of another for compensation beyond visual line of sight.”
The company also recently received FAA approval to enable its onboard autonomous detect and avoid system. The system relies on sound to avoid mid-air collisions as a series of small microphones pick up on air traffic with a range up to 1.25 miles.
Zipline is already conducting some drone delivery in North Carolina, Arkansas and Utah, with its P1 drone, which drops packages via parachute. The startup is among aircraft providers working with Walmart, which completed 6,000 drone deliveries in 2022. The retail giant said in January that it had expanded drone delivery to 36 delivery hubs in seven states last year.
Pagliacci would join another Washington state company in linking up with Zipline. MultiCare Health System of Tacoma, Wash., wants to deliver medical products to its network of facilities, including hospitals, laboratories and doctors’ offices.
Zipline says its docking and charging hardware is designed to have a light footprint that can be attached to any building — like a pizza parlor — or set up as a freestanding structure. A drone can be loaded by a business’ employee.
“We’re set and ready to go when they give us the green light in terms of embarking on modifying stores to allow for drone delivery,” Galvin said.
Pagliacci and Zipline worked together on a custom-designed pizza box which lets each droid fit two 13″ pizzas as well as side dishes. So if your Super Bowl party requires big pizzas, those are still going to be delivered by car. And Galvin said the company’s drivers aren’t going to be displaced by drones.
Pagliacci has been working for years to reduce its carbon footprint through such measures as purchasing green power, composting, using FSC-certified paper, delivering with some electric cars and bikes, and more.
“I do think that we as a society need to innovate around distribution,” Galvin said. “There will always be vehicles, and there will likely be combustion vehicles, but it can’t just be one 3,000-pound vehicle delivering a four-pound payload in perpetuity. That doesn’t seem like our best strategy.”
Zipline’s other new customers announced Wednesday include health and wellness brand GNC, which will offer delivery in Salt Lake City to start, and Associated Couriers, which operates long-term care facilities across Long Island, N.Y., and will use Zipline for delivery of prescriptions and medications.
Founded in 2011, the South San Francisco-based startup is valued at about $4.2 billion, according to Forbes. The company raised $330 million in an April funding round, and has raised more than $800 million total, according to Pitchbook and others. Zipline drew attention from popular YouTuber Mark Rober, who dedicated a recent segment to the company.
Zipline competes against a number of other drone startups and larger companies, including Amazon. The Seattle tech giant revealed its plan for drone delivery of packages a decade ago and just started putting the technology to the test in the U.S. at the end of 2022.
“It took years of inventing, testing, and improving to develop these breakthrough technologies, and we’re excited to use them to make customer deliveries,” the tech giant said last June.
But Wired reported in April that Amazon’s drone delivery dream is “crashing” as it’s been hit by technical and regulatory setbacks, missed targets, and layoffs.
