Swiggy has continued to carry torch in pioneering e-commerce direct to customer delivery as they plan to start testing out deliveries using drones. The company has already picked out 4 start-ups in the drone industry to pilot this new method of delivery. If this initial phase goes well, it will truly revolutionise the world of delivery not only in the country, but across the world.
The four companies that have been hand picked are Garuda Aerospace which is based in Bangalore, Skyeair Mobility which is based in the capital along with ANRA+TechEagle which is also based in the same city and Marut Dronetech which is based in the city of Hyderabad.
Swiggy currently plans to only have drone delivery for their instamart and not food deliveries. The delivery will not be done directly by the drone, but the drone will transport the ordered products from the store to the delivery centre. From there, the assigned delivery partner will take the products and deliver to the customer’s doorstep.
This is will first be tested out in the Delhi – NCR region and in Bangalore.
Garuda Aerospace and Skyeair Mobility will start their pilots with Swiggy sometime within the next 4 weeks while the other two companies will start out their tests after that which is likely to be in the month of June.
The first pilot will be used to gauge the average amount of time that is reduced with this technology along with fixing any other short comings which they would not have thought of.
Swiggy sent out a Request for Proposal (RFP), which is basically an open invitation to all players in the Indian drone market to send them their application and portfolio to partner with them. Close to 350 companies registered to get the chance to partner up with Swiggy and after a thorough consideration of all the applicants, Swiggy narrowed it down to the four aforementioned companies.
Drones seem to be the future of almost every industry and the delivery one is no exception. It has always been assumed that drones would do wonders for delivery and Swiggy is finally testing it out. This would definitely cut the delivery times as drones don’t have to go through traffic which would also reduce the cost to deliver groceries as drones don’t use fuel as well whose prices have been rising for months now. With many companies now delivering groceries, Swiggy is looking to get ahead of the competition as soon as possible.