Drone deliveries have been heralded as the future of food—and coffee—delivery for well over a decade. And it’s true that, in a few places, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are already delivering all sorts of items (and sometimes getting attacked by birds, dropping packages into ponds, or simply crashing along the way).
Within coffee, drone delivery experiments have persisted for years. A group of Dutch entrepreneurs invented the Coffee Copter in 2014, and Google’s parent company, Alphabet, tested drone delivery in partnership with Starbucks around the same time.
And yet, for all the hype, and the corporate interest in advancing such programs, widespread drone delivery has yet to arrive. In fact, outside of rural environments, drone delivery may neverbecome ubiquitous—but that hasn’t stopped companies from trying.
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Drone delivery has long been touted as the future by tech industry titans, among them Jeff Bezos. “One day, Prime Air vehicles will be as normal as seeing mail trucks on the road today”, the Amazon CEO confidently told 60 Minutes in 2013.
Amazon, UPS, and other retail and delivery companies have worked on drones for more than a decade, banking on them to solve the “last-mile delivery problem”. As Navid Mohammad Imran wrote in a 2024 paper, getting packages from a distribution centre to the customer’s home is often “the most inefficient and time-consuming segment of the entire delivery process”. It’s also one of the most expensive, accounting for up to 53% of total shipping costs.
Drones, then, offer a theoretically cheaper and more efficient system for these short delivery journeys. UAVs can “efficiently navigate through congested urban environments, bypassing obstacles and deliver packages directly to recipients, thus reducing delivery times and operational costs”, Imran wrote.
Some drone delivery programs are already underway. In rural Virginia, residents of Christiansburg can get their Wendy’s order delivered by drone. An Irish company called Manna Aero has been delivering food and other small items in Dublin and elsewhere since 2020, and recently raised $50 million to expand to the U.S. Other food delivery projects are underway in Singapore, Pakistan, Finland, and elsewhere.
The appeal for coffee companies in particular is obvious. Delivery by humans is expensive, and only getting more so. Although once underwritten by deep-pocketed venture capitalists, delivery apps like Uber Eats and DoorDash have started raising prices. In China, the price wars between Luckin Coffee and its competitors were driven in large part by subsidised delivery, something that is going away following regulatory changes.
There is also the issue of timing. Hot coffee, especially espresso-based drinks, needs to be consumed relatively quickly after being made; iced coffee, although it lasts slightly longer, eventually becomes diluted. Drones can offer a faster way to get coffee in customers’ hands within a tight time frame.
Coffee brands and their tech partners are looking into the possibilities. A company called Flytrex was experimenting with delivering Starbucks in North Carolina in 2021. Manna in Ireland says coffee is its most-requested item. In Australia, Alphabet’s drone service, Wing, is working with DoorDash to deliver coffee and other takeaway items around Melbourne. Alphabet said it delivered 10,000 cups of coffee in Logan, Australia between 2020 and 2021.
This view is echoed by Faine Greenwood, a civilian drone consultant who has written extensively on the regulatory and ethical considerations of UAVs. “I have long felt that drone delivery is kind of a stupid gimmick”, they tell me. It turns out that, while it might be a fun novelty to get your latte delivered by a UAV, there are significant downsides.
‘If Drones Come In, It’ll Hit Us Even Harder’
Much like other advances billed as the inevitable future by tech CEOs, including generative AI and delivery robots, drone delivery has been greeted with skepticism by the general public. A 2016 survey by the U.S. Postal Service found that, while they liked the idea of quicker delivery, Americans were “ambiguous” on the subject and “do not yet trust drone technology”.
One key issue is that people do not like drones flying over their houses. Manna, the Irish drone delivery startup, has fielded numerous complaints from locals. Similarly, residents of College Station, Texas, have complained about the noise generated by an Amazon drone trial. “It sounds like a giant hive of bees”, one resident told CNBC. It’s also difficult to safely navigate the various barriers found within urban environments. How do you deliver coffee to someone living in an apartment building, for example?
There are other concerns. Surveys have shown that consumers worry about the surveillance and privacy issues inherent to drone use. While the E.U. has rules surrounding data collection and privacy for UAVs, Greenwood tells me, there is no comparable regulation at the federal level in the U.S.
Plus, drone delivery isn’t even that cheap—at least not yet. A 2023 report by McKinsey found that using a drone still costs more than making similar deliveries by car or van. Internal Amazon projections showed that each drone delivery in 2025 cost the company $63, according to Business Insider. By comparison, an on-the-ground delivery cost $5.50. McKinsey’s report estimated that the cost will come down if regulations allow operators to monitor multiple drones, but that also brings up another issue: labour.
Gig workers in India have voiced similar concerns. Shambhu Kumar told Nikkei in December 2025 that working for a delivery app in New Delhi was already difficult, with workers being monitored and controlled at every stage. “If drones come in, it’ll hit us even harder”, he said. “It gives these companies one more way to avoid offering social protection. Drones don’t need salaries or medical care. They’re cheaper, faster—and then what happens to us?”
Mark Graham, a professor at the Oxford Internet Institute, concurred. “Drone delivery doesn’t erase the need for humans; it shifts labor from the visible street to the invisible back end”, Graham told Nikkei. “The danger is not that jobs disappear, but that they become worse: more invisible, less protected and harder to organize”.
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In Vietnam, “drones equipped with multispectral cameras can detect stress in coffee plants caused by nutrient deficiencies, water scarcity, or disease outbreaks, often before these issues become visible to the naked eye”, Pham M. Tuan wrote in a 2025 paper. Drones have also been used to help map coffee farms in the run-up to the implementation of the E.U.’s deforestation regulation.
Lyela Mutisya tells me she was inspired to utilise her skills as a drone operator after returning to Kenya in 2014. She had moved to the U.S. as a child, but going back to Kenya let her reconnect with her father, a coffee farmer. “I learned about the challenges he goes through on a daily basis, alongside other coffee farmers; they’re making little money”, she says. Since 2022, Mutisya has worked with farmers and cooperatives in Kenya, flying drones above farms to monitor crop health and soil conditions. Using this technology, she says, can help coffee farmers “increase yields, reduce cost, improve quality, and build a more sustainable and profitable agriculture cycle”.
While Mutisya is able to help farmers on a small scale, the cost of UAVs puts them out of the reach of the majority of smallholder coffee farmers without government or private sector assistance. But their use by researchers looking to fight coffee pests and diseases is more widespread. Last year, for example, Australian researchers used drones and advanced image processing to detect the presence of tiny coffee berry borer beetles, a highly damaging pest.
Additionally, between 2017 and 2019, scientists at Imperial College London ran multiple projects looking at how drones equipped with special cameras could be used to detect coffee leaf rust before it spreads. “Coffee rust can be utterly devastating to farmers who rely on the income for their livelihoods”, Imperial’s Dr. Oliver Windram said in a 2019 press release. “The benefit of using drones is that they are non-invasive and do not damage the product ... We hope the drones will be able to spot the disease early enough before it decimates the crop”.
Is Drone Coffee Delivery Actually the Future?
In 2025, the U.S. government announced an overhaul of drone delivery regulations, designed to make it easier for operators to control UAVs outside their line of sight. Previously, companies had to apply for individual waivers to allow their operators to fly drones beyond their direct sightline. “It’s going to change the way that people and products move throughout our airspace”, U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in a press conference. “So you may change the way you get your Amazon package, you may get a Starbucks cup of coffee from a drone”.
Industry bodies welcomed the proposed rule change, but while companies like Matternet claim to be testing drone delivery with Starbucks, widespread rollout of UAV-based coffee delivery has yet to occur. Where drone delivery is being implemented, such as the recent planned expansion of a Walmart delivery hub in Georgia, locals have fought back. Manna continues to face pushback from residents as it tries to expand around Ireland.
Greenwood says the success or failure of drone delivery will come down to “how willing people are going to be to put up with a bunch of annoying noises and intrusion for the sake of their neighbors getting a latte because they were too lazy to get in the car”.
They admit that, while they are “a known drone delivery hater”, there are some reasonable UAV use cases, such as delivering time-sensitive medical supplies. “But for boba? No. That’s dumb and we shouldn’t allow it”.
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I'm a coffee writer and creator of The Pourover. Based in Scotland, I have over a decade of experience in the specialty coffee industry. Ask me about coffeewashing. It's pronounced Fin (he/him)
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