Yoshinoya tests drone delivery service
The country’s long history of delivery services goes to new heights.
Yoshinoya Co., one of the largest fast food chains in Japan, has tested a drone service that delivers “gyudon” beef-on-rice dishes.
In partnership with delivery service operator Demae-can Co., the chain offered a flight demonstration in Kanagawa Prefecture that saw staff working out of a food truck near a park in the city cooking up gyudon dishes for four people.
Demae-can staff then placed the dishes into a box that keeps them warm and loaded it onto a drone, which later arrived on the roof of a city-run hospital some five kilometers away after ten minutes.
The flight test was ahead of a possible revision of the country’s Civil Aeronautics Law, understood to possibly happen as early as fiscal 2022, where drones can be flown beyond the line of sight of their operators and even above urban areas.
