I should apologize. In a post published on The Spoon this morning, I asked How Are You Getting Your Groceries? Delivery, Curbside Pickup or In-Store?

Drone Grocery Delivery Coming to Mobile, Alabama

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2020-07-09 09:00:31

I should apologize. In a post published on The Spoon this morning, I asked How Are You Getting Your Groceries? Delivery, Curbside Pickup or In-Store? In doing so, I failed to include “by drone delivery” among the choices, and it looks like I should have, at least, if you live in Mobile, Alabama.

Rouses Market, which has 64 stores along the Gulf Coast, announced yesterday that it has partnered with Deuce Drone to test grocery delivery by drone in Mobile this Fall (tip of the hat to Grocery Dive, who first reported the story). According to the press release, the drones will be able to deliver groceries in under 30 minutes.

There are plenty of other drone delivery programs in various stages of deployment around the world, but Rouses’ is the first we know of that’s specifically for groceries. In Ireland, Manna is doing restaurant delivery. Ditto for Uber in San Diego. Google’s Wing did latte delivery in Canberra, Australia. And in India, food delivery company Zomato acquired drone company TechEagle.

The press announcement didn’t specify anything around flight range or how much cargo each drone flight could/would carry. So we don’t know if it can replace a full trip to the grocery store or not (probably not, given how heavy groceries can get). We’ve reached out to Deuce Drone for more details.