s “anytime, anywhere, anyhow”. “We are passionate about finding innovative ways to help our customers to shop with us,” said Hassing.  “By partnering with Wing, we’re able to offer our online customers another convenient option to purchase the Coles items they know and love and get them delivered straight to their door.” The deal taps into the changing customer preference to do smaller shops more often, rather than doing one large weekly shop, allowing customers to order a few items at a time to replenish basic items like milk, toilet paper and eggs. Coles is the first supermarket to partner with Wing, tapping into the growing drone delivery market, which is forecasted to grow to US$63.6 billion by 2025, according to ResearchAndMarkets. Shoot for the sky The last several months have also seen major fast food retailers KFC, Roll’d and Domino’s partner with Wing in an effort to get their meals delivered to customers even faster.  According to Wing Australia’s general manager Simon Rossi, the business has worked with both small and large operators, although there has been an influx of big businesses getting onboard in the last year.  “To put it in context, drone delivery is increasingly becoming integrated into Australians’ lives, and in 2021 alone, we completed more than 100,000 deliveries,” Rossi told Inside Retail.  “We talk about Australia as the drone capital of the world, and those numbers show that Australians have really taken to it.” Wing originally launched in the US before expanding to Australia and Finland, and is a subsidiary of Google-owner Alphabet. It’s not just food that is being delivered, however. RAT tests have increasingly been ordered using drones across Wing’s regions of service in Brisbane and Canberra – with the automated delivery proving useful when someone suspects they may have contracted Covid-19 and are in self-isolation prior to testing. Several pharmacies have also partnered with Wing to deliver over the counter medication to patients. “We’ve partnered with TerryWhite in Logan and we’ve seen some really good results out of that partnership,” Rossi said. “And we’ve also got a partnership with St. John’s Ambulance where we’re delivering masks and first aid kits.” Stay-at-home fuels growth That convenience, as well as lockdowns and the new working-from-home lifestyle, has led to a quick uptake of Wing’s services in the communities it operates within. “We definitely saw some macro-decisions that led to people relying on delivery and trying out drone delivery, and we saw some strong growth in e-commerce across all of our sectors in the last two years,” Rossi said.  “And we’re expecting to see that growth continue. For us, that means partnering with more merchants in the communities we operate in.” For customers outside of Canberra and Brisbane, though, drone delivery isn’t as readily accessible.  There are legal restrictions relating to flight paths and privacy that must be overcome before the technology can be rolled out more broadly, as well as the onboard AI’s ability to navigate high-dentist locations. “The impact on local environments [is of concern] – Canberra’s drone operations have been hampered by bird attacks. It’s easy to see how drones work in open spaces and far-flung low-density locations, but it’s harder to see how this will work in dense and congested metro spaces – and it’s hard to see how airspace approvals will be given for this,” Macquarie Business School’s professor Jana Bowden recently told Inside Retail. “It’s easy to see the future problems now.”