While the U.S. gig economy worries about Uber’s new CEO, overseas on-demand food delivery is going through changes of its own.
On-demand food delivery in China
China web service giant Baidu (similar to Google in the U.S.) announced that it had merged its food delivery company, Xiaodu (Waimai brand). They announced the disposal/merger with Rajax, which operates China’s largest food delivery brand, ele.me. A statement from Baidu stated that Xiaodu is now a subsidiary of Rajax.
Initial estimates seemed to indicate that the deal could be worth around $800 million. However, Waimai’s worth last year was over $2.5 billion.
Baidu had been looking to spread out its business ventures, and a food delivery service was just one of many things it attempted. Other search companies – including Google in the U.S. and Yandex in Russia – have attempted to diversify through on-demand offerings as well. Google tried to build a shopping service, while Yandex tried for on-demand transportation.
On-demand food delivery in Iceland
The other side of the globe took a different approach to on-demand food service: drones. Iceland capital city Reykjavik has drones making on-demand food deliveries as of last Wednesday.
Robots are hardly new to the gig economy. Postmates rolled out robots earlier this year. Uber, on the other hand, seemed to be announcing plans to replace their drivers all together.
However, Reykjavik has terrain that isn’t suited to robots. The wait time frustrated customers and caused efficiency issues for companies. AHA – similar to GrubHub in the U.S. – teamed up with Tel-Aviv based drone supplier Flytrex to use drones instead.
Drone Deployment in Iceland
Flytrex expects their fleet of drones to cut at least 20 minutes off delivery time. What would take a courier 25 minutes to drive through city streets and traffic can arrive by drone in four minutes, according to Flytrex CEO Yariv Bash.
However, workers aren’t cut entirely from the picture just yet. The Flytrex drones will deploy in two parts. For the first phase, an AHA worker still has to load the drone, which then flies the order across the city. A second worker then waits to unload the drone and complete the delivery.
Next year, Flytrex plans for customers to receive their orders directly from the drone via a wire. This wire will lower the order into the customers’ back yards.
Not only does the change avoid traffic, but Bash said it should also cut production costs by 60 percent. Unfortunately, the news won’t have such happy effects for the gig economy workers being displaced through technology.
Flytrex isn’t exactly innovating either, though. Amazon beat them to the record for the first commercial delivery via drone – nearly a year ago. However, Amazon’s drone only made a one-time delivery of a large bag of popcorn and a TV streaming stick in England. Bash, on the other hand, has had to work to get approval from Iceland’s government in order to deploy the fleet of drones in the capital city.
