Food delivery platform Swiggy all set to start drone trials for grocery service

BENGALURU:  The buzz around grocery delivery service has reached new heights, as online food delivery major Swiggy will make use of drones for its grocery service Instamart. Swiggy will commence the pilot immediately in two tranches- starting in Bengaluru and Delhi-NCR.

The pilot will be executed with Garuda Aerospace in Bengaluru and Skye Air Mobility in Delhi-NCR. After the learnings from the first tranche, the food delivery firm will commence its tranche 2 along with ANRA, TechEagle Consortia and Marut Dronetech.

Drones will be used to replenish stocks between seller-run dark stores and from a store to a common customer point, Swiggy said, and added that a delivery partner will then pick up orders from the common point and deliver them to the customer’s doorstep.

Dark stores are retail distribution centres that cater to online shoppers. Last year, Swiggy had done trials along with ANRA Technologies for the BVLOS (Beyond Visual Line of Sight) experiments. 

“Our intent is to use valuable learnings from the first tranche and design a tranche 2 experiment to address any shortcomings that are identified,” Swiggy said in a blog post. Based on the pilot and progress, Swiggy will expand it in the region.

Garuda Aerospace said they are extremely delighted to be part of Swiggy’s pilot to evaluate the feasibility of drones for its instant grocery service- Instamart. Drone delivery solves the puzzle of quick commerce, faster delivery in shortest time. With drones delivering groceries from dark stores to residential societies, the companies in the quick commerce space can extend the range of services from current 2 km to 5 km radius ensuring the same delivery time, Ankit Kumar, CEO, Skye Air Mobility, tells TNIE.

The drone delivery start-up CEO adds that a dark store is not optimally utilised which incurs a lot of cost to the quick commerce firms. As dark stores currently only cater to 2 km radius in order to meet 10 minutes delivery time, they move on to create more dark stores to service the consumer.  “The challenge they face with more dark stores is less capacity utilisation, higher capex for inventory management and higher overheads.

Drone delivery inclusion in the quick commerce industry will help firms to overcome the challenges and build a more sustainable model to service consumers,” Kumar says. Swiggy entered the quick commerce grocery category with the launch of Instamart in August 2020. Last year, it announced that it will invest $700 mn in Instamart, which is present in over 21 cities.

As per a RedSeer report, quick commerce has an addressable market opportunity of $50 billion in India, and apart from Zomato, there are other players such as Dunzo and Zepto.