Meituan is piloting meal delivery by drone in Shenzhen. It’s not door to door yet, and still labor-intensive, but the service seems poised to take off. In a buzzy urban area in Shenzhen. Sandwiched between several skyscrapers, a yellow-and-black drone was seen descending onto a pickup kiosk by the street. The top of the vending-machine-size kiosk opens up for the drone to land, and a white cardboard box containing a drink is placed inside. “When I made the delivery order, on my phone half an hour ago,” a South China Morning Post reporter explained, “the app noted that it would arrive by drone at 2.03 pm, and that is exactly when it came. The drone delivery service I am trying out is operated by Meituan, China’s most popular food delivery platform.”
In 2022, the company engaged some 6 million gig workers to deliver billions of orders. But the company has also been developing drone delivery since 2017. And in Shenzhen, a city in southern China that’s home to a mature drone supply chain, Meituan has been regularly operating such deliveries for the past year and a half. Many big corporations have had their eyes on drone delivery: Amazon first proposed the service in 2013, but its progress has been limited by regulations and a lack of demand. Wing, owned by Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has had more success, operating drone deliveries on three continents, while Walmart is backing several drone start-ups to experiment with delivering its products.
What differentiates Meituan from these American peers is that it has chosen to offer drone delivery in what is potentially the most challenging environment: dense urban neighborhoods. It is an approach that makes sense in China, where most people live in high-rise residential buildings in populous cities, and many of them order food delivery on a daily basis. To make the service work in a dense city, Meituan doesn’t have the drones deliver directly to your doorstep. Instead, the company has set up pickup kiosks close to residential or office buildings. Drones drop off deliveries at the kiosks, which can hold several packages at once. The process may be less convenient for customers, but it allows every drone to fly a predetermined route, from one launch pad to one kiosk, making the task of navigating urban areas much easier.
For some Shenzhen residents and vendors, delivery by drone is no longer a novelty – it’s part of their daily routine. Meituan’s progress shows that regular drone delivery in cities is possible, despite requiring some compromises when it comes to user experience. Meituan launches its drones in Shenzhen from five delivery hubs. One is on the rooftop of a gigantic shopping mall – an area that has been turned into an airport for the drones and a handful of support staff. One day in April, there were about 10 drones parked on the rooftop, and two or three either taking off or landing.
The workflow is a mix of human and automated labor. When the drone delivery system receives an order, a human runner heads to the restaurants, located a few flights down in the shopping center, to pick up the order and brings it to the launch pad. The food and drinks are placed in a standardized cardboard box, weighed to ensure it’s not too heavy, the box is sealed, and the runner hands it off to another worker who specializes in working with the drones. The second worker places the box under a drone and waits for it to lock in. Everything that follows is highly automated, says Mao Yinian, Director of drone delivery services at Meituan. The drones’ movements are controlled by a central algorithm, and the routes are predetermined. “You can know in advance, at every precise second, where each drone will be and how fast its speed is, so the customers can expect the arrival time with a deviation of two seconds, instead of three minutes or even 10 minutes for traditional deliveries.”
The company has a centralized control room in Shenzhen, where staff can take control of a drone in an emergency. There are now more than 100 drones that can be deployed for deliveries in the city. On average, one operator is monitoring 10 drones at any time. Not all human labor can or should be replaced by machines, says Mao. But the company has plans to automate even more of the delivery process, the South China Morning Post reports.
