Shift Magazine - March 2021 - S21

PepsiCo's " snackbots, "
with their ease of access
and low footprint,
were a good fit for the
University of the Pacific's
campus.

according to the type of food, who's supplying it and how far it has to travel.
The cargo could be consumer packaged goods and other groceries from
retailers ranging from Walmart to Kroger,
or it could be perishables, such as fresh
produce, or hot meals from restaurants.
There is long-haul trucking, midrange
or regional distribution, and last-mile
delivery, which gets meals and other
goods to consumers' doorsteps or items
from the warehouse to the loading docks
of a grocery store.

SIDEWALK SUCCESS STORY

The fastest progress has been in lastmile deliveries of perishables for restaurants and grocery stores, partly incentivized by how third-party human deliveries
of restaurant meals, necessitated by the
COVID-19 pandemic, eat up revenues,
Davenport said.
As opposed to self-driving road vehicles, ground-delivery bots, including cooler-shaped sidewalk robots, are booming
in particular. This is in part because " companies fear accidents from AVs based on
automobiles, and liability insurance costs
are really high, " Davenport said. " So if

you take a smaller vehicle, moving much
more slowly, you radically reduce the risk
profile. "
But available technology can propel
AVs only so far in delivery. " Anything in
this space needs to be grounded first and
foremost in a consumer need, a tension
that we can meet, " said Andre Moraes
Sr., a senior director of digital for PepsiCo
Foodservice.
For example, PepsiCo's test of a
self-driving " snackbot " called Hello
Goodness at the University of the Pacific
in Stockton, Calif., " identified the need
for ease of accessing snacks and beverages on the go within a college campus
and met it with a solution that had a low
footprint, no interference and fit well
within the campus space, " Moraes said.
Last-mile challenges include the need
for sophisticated obstacle-avoidance systems for delivery drones to operate effectively in complex urban environments.
" Construction drones, for instance,
operate within a manageable workspace, but food-delivery drones need to
move around pretty much boundlessly, "
said Yoojung Hong, CEO of This Is
Engineering, a Seoul-based drone maker.

Reilly Brennan is among those who
aren't bullish on the long-term future of
AV delivery of restaurant meals. " Most
coverage is written and consumed by
people who live in cities and have a lot of
money, " said Brennan, whose company,
Trucks Venture Capital, is based in San
Francisco. " The average American family
isn't doing seven-nights-a-week delivery
with DoorDash. "

MIDDLE GROUND

In the realm of regional distribution,
the appeal of using AVs for " milk runs "
on often-repeated, business-to-business
see FOOD, p. 22
march 2021 * shift

Shift Magazine - March 2021

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