Chipotle/Zipline
- Drone delivery is gaining momentum with pilot programs from Chipotle, GoTo Foods, and beyond.Regulatory changes, including a June executive order, have given the sector a significant boost.Safety, reliability, and noise concerns remain as drone delivery expands in suburban areas.
After years of stalled experiments and regulatory hurdles, drone delivery is beginning to take flight in the US.
Chipotle in August began teaming up with drone delivery and logistics provider Zipline to ensure Dallas area fans can get their burritos and bowls delivered — anytime, and almost any place. In June, GoTo Foods partnered with DoorDash and Wing to bring items from its portfolio of brands, including Auntie Anne's and Jamba, to three Texas markets: Frisco, Fort Worth, and Plano.
The pilot programs build upon short-lived drone delivery experiments from other brands that have been rolled out and subsequently discontinued over the last decade, like the Flytrex and El Pollo Loco partnership, which briefly took to the skies in 2021.
This moment, however, seems to be different, five industry insiders told Business Insider.
"I do think it's an inflection point for the industry," Kent Ferguson, head of partnerships for Wing, said. "We have an improving regulatory framework to allow us to service more customers and scale much more quickly. We have the infrastructure that is flexible, cost-effective, and we have the planes on hand — thousands of planes — to service the millions of customers."
Multiple companies, including Zipline, Wing, Flytrex, and DroneUp, are vying for commercial drone dominance with their unique designs of unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, for short. Some of the aircraft resemble miniature passenger planes, while others resemble hobbyist drones, featuring four rotating propellers and an attached payload.
From an operational standpoint, the challenges of drone delivery for participating retailers are the same as those of an order being picked up by a human driver or a robot courier, GoTo Foods' chief commercial officer, Kieran Donahue, told Business Insider.
"We still have to make sure we get the right items in the bag, that the food is prepared properly," Donahue said. "It doesn't matter whether it's coming from a DoorDasher in a traditional car or a drone."
The benefits to retailers, though, are clear: faster delivery times, lower labor costs, and increased customer satisfaction — and it's not just GoTo Foods and Chipotle that want in on the perks. Major grocery players, including Walmart and Amazon, are rolling out pilot programs at scale. Getting dinner ingredients delivered by drone may soon be as common as ordering take-out through Grubhub or Uber Eats.
A recent regulatory breakthrough
Although drone technology has become increasingly useful to the commercial sector in recent years due to technological advancements, the recent momentum isn't thanks to better hardware alone — it's also due to the regulatory climate.
L.R. Fox is the founder and CEO of WhiteFox Defense Technologies and vice chair of the US Chamber of Commerce Drone Committee. He told Business Insider that a June executive order signed by President Donald Trump was a catalytic moment for the industry. It signaled a path forward and broke through an otherwise complicated web of federal regulations that had prevented widespread adoption.
"The key thing that enables drone delivery is known as 'Beyond Visual Line of Sight,'" Fox said. "Up until this point, you have companies that had literally a guy standing on a rooftop, flying the drone until he can't see anymore, and then another guy standing on a rooftop and taking over control of the drone."
The executive order set the stage for the Department of Transportation and Federal Aviation Administration, which control the country's airspace, to enable and monitor routine Beyond Visual Line of Sight operations for drones for commercial and public safety purposes.
So far, the test programs are gaining traction and shaving precious minutes off delivery times, representatives for both GoTo Foods and Chipotle told Business Insider.
"What's unique about drone delivery is, with this particular technology, we don't have to implement the drones at every restaurant to be able to still have full coverage of an area," Chipotle chief technology officer Curt Garner said. "One restaurant out of five or six may be able to have the same delivery radius that we would typically experience with somebody going into a restaurant and driving a car as a courier."
The Texas market, in particular, has been a playground for drone pilot programs, in part because of its temperate weather and the layout of its cities, Harrison Shih, head of the DoorDash Drone Program, told Business Insider.
"It's fairly suburban, a lot of single-family homes," Shih said. "These are the profiles that drones fly really well in, where they can lower packages."
The DoorDash Drone Program is also operating in Charlotte, North Carolina, for similar reasons. Both sites offer the company essential testing data for scaling up in more congested neighborhoods.
"Hopefully, what we see in 2026 is that the market will open up, and more and more metropolitan areas will be able to be covered," Shih said.
Still to tackle: No-drone zones and propeller noise
Still, as these experiments move closer to the mainstream, questions about safety and reliability persist.
A 2024 survey by the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator for Political Economy and Regulation found that 70% of respondents were concerned that drones would disturb their neighborhoods and may be unsafe, and 51% would oppose legislation to expand US airspace for delivery drones.
"Right now, if somebody launched a drone and had a bomb on it, there's very little anybody can do to stop it," Fox said. "Not from a technology standpoint, but just from a deployment and authorities standpoint — local or state law enforcement cannot do anything to stop a drone, it's a federal crime for them to do that, which is insane."
Federal authorities have limited authority to disable or destroy threatening drones that pose a threat to their facilities or national security. Proposed laws aim to grant state and local police more authority, but have not yet been passed.
One of the primary concerns in the industry now is that when companies fly hundreds or thousands of drones a day across various populated areas, "one of them is going to have some kind of incident," Fox said.
"So working through how that's resolved is definitely a factor," he added. "Then, trying to ensure that it doesn't cause a complete halt or pause to the industry."
Beyond the safety concerns, other practical considerations are still being addressed, such as determining suitable delivery zones and mitigating noise from propeller blades.
"The likelihood of the drone delivery straight to your window is very far off," Fox said. "We might not ever see in our lifetimes."
For now, when using platforms like Wing and Zipline, customers mark their preferred delivery zone when setting up their order — generally required to be a flat surface the size of a picnic blanket with clear skies overhead.
Garner said Zipline is addressing noise concerns from both design and operational standpoints: "The drones are quite high in the air when the payload is lowered, so that buzzing noise that you would typically associate with a zone with the drone isn't audible," he said.
Even with hurdles ahead, the companies testing drones say the momentum is more real now than it has been before. By shaving minutes off delivery times, reducing labor costs, and opening up new occasions for off-premise dining — from soccer fields to suburban cul-de-sacs — drones are being positioned not as a gimmick but as a serious tool in the future of last-mile logistics.
If these trials succeed, the next frontier in convenience shopping might not be at your doorstep, but hovering right above it.
