A Capriotti’s sandwich shop on the border of Frisco and Little Elm is one of the first North Texas restaurants to have a rooftop takeoff and landing dock for the drone delivery service Flytrex. [Photo: Flytrex]
When you schedule a food delivery, you unfortunately might end up chowing down on cold burgers or pizza if delivery delays happen. That certainly can leave a bad taste in your mouth.
A drone delivery service operated by Tel Aviv-based Flytrex hopes to reduce that likelihood. How? By rolling out drones that use rooftop takeoff and landing docks to shuttle orders from North Texas restaurants to customers.
Capriotti’s, a sandwich shop on the border of Frisco and Little Elm, is one of those restaurants. A Flytrex spokesman said the company is working with several large national chains that operate Dallas-Fort Worth restaurants. On its website, the company said its local delivery zones also include restaurants in Hurst, Rowlett and Wylie.
Faster and cheaper deliveries
The company said its new DFW system can cut delivery costs by 60% while speeding up deliveries. Using predictive AI modeling, Flytrex stages drones at restaurants during busy periods “so the drone arrives before the order does,” the company said.
“Every drone delivery company has promised food in minutes. The truly challenging part has never been the flight; it’s the last few hundred feet between the kitchen and the aircraft,” Amit Regev, co-founder and CEO of Flytrex, said in a statement.
Most operators dispatch drones from a central location when an order is ready for pickup. Thanks to Flytrex’s drone-and-dock setup, a restaurant worker can quickly clip an order to a drone’s hook, the company said. The worker never touches the aircraft.
“Our system knows where the next order is coming from before it’s placed, the drone is already waiting on the roof, restaurant staff loads it in seconds, and it’s in the air on its way to the customer,” Regev said. “No courier, no runner, no Flytrex employee at the restaurant.”
“That is what drone delivery was always supposed to look like,” he said, “and [our system is] what makes it faster, smarter and dramatically lower-cost.”
Delivery logistics
The Flytrex docking platform sits at the edge of a restaurant’s rooftop. An opening in the platform enables the drone to drop a hook to grab orders from restaurant staff and take off for delivering quickly. [Photo: Flytrex]
To properly position drones, the company’s machine-learning models analyze patterns, such as popular delivery times and locations, to predict order hotspots. Based on that data, Flytrex puts idle aircraft at restaurants ahead of busy delivery periods, the company said. A drone’s motor shuts off until it’s called to duty.
The Flytrex docking platform sits at the edge of a rooftop, ideally close to a restaurant’s back door, the company said. Once an employee brings an order, an opening in the platform enables the drone to drop a hook to grab it. Within seconds, the drone lifts off and whisks the order to the customer.
Flytrex said the system requires no additional real estate, no structural modifications and no dedicated drone staff.
Flytrex operations in North Texas
Founded in 2013, Flytrex began operating in Dallas-Fort Worth in 2022. It maintains an office in Dallas and operates a manufacturing facility in Pilot Point.
Flytrex employs 30 people in DFW in areas like engineering, aircraft assembly and maintenance, operations, sales and support. A Flytrex spokesperson told Dallas Innovates the company expects to roughly triple its current headcount by the end of 2027.
Aside from Flytrex’s own DFW workforce, partner company Causey Aviation Unmanned employs several dozen drone operators, maintenance personnel and other people to support Flytrex’s DFW network.
More partners
Flytrex relies on several other partners for its drone network.
In July, the company unveiled a partnership with autonomous logistics platform Nash to help manage food deliveries. In April, the company teamed up with the Little Caesars pizza chain to launch a new Sky2 drone capable of carrying an order weighing up to 8.8 pounds.
The company also secured an investment from Uber as part of a partnership to fulfill Uber Eats orders and forged a DoorDash partnership for drone deliveries in Frisco and Little Elm.
R E A D N E X T
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By combining Flytrex’s drone fleet with Nash’s orchestration system, the companies can route customer orders to the fastest, most reliable way to fill them. Drones take the lead for most orders, and Nash’s on-demand couriers carry the rest.
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The Frisco-built V-BAT maker put its Hivemind software in charge of three National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology Mighty Hornet III unmanned aerial vehicles for a field demonstration.
