The well-known food delivery platform Grubhub is joining forces with Dexa, a drone delivery provider, in a venture that will enable restaurant orders to literally soar to your doorstep. Wonder, the parent company of Grubhub, is piloting this service within a 2.5-mile radius of its Green Brook, New Jersey site, and the experimental program is set to last for three months.
Would you feel confident in a drone delivering your meal? If you’ve ever had a Grubhub driver mishandle your soda or jolt your pizza to the point of disarray, you might struggle to trust a human with the task, much less a drone. It’s not solely about the state of your order, as there are also safety issues linked to drone deliveries. As recently as October 2025, Amazon’s delivery drones collided with a crane cable in an incident that could have led to significant injury.
Drone delivery presents an intriguing notion, but specialists have voiced concerns regarding surveillance and privacy. In a Food Institute piece, James McDanolds, program chair for the School of Uncrewed Technology at the Sonoran Desert Institute, remarked, “Drones are now so associated with surveillance anxieties and military applications that many individuals will have those concerns at the forefront.”
Drone delivery is gaining reliability in 2026
Despite the setbacks and mishaps that firms like Amazon have faced with drone delivery systems previously, the fact remains that drones are increasingly capable of transporting goods directly to end consumers. A Chinese drone fleet manages lunch deliveries in Hefei on a large scale, and this fleet also undertakes a diverse array of other shipping duties and even aerial transport. Simultaneously, the Chinese government is actively overseeing drone certification and accountability. The integration of innovation and regulation is steering drone technology toward a more dependable state of operation.
Safety and regulations are critical for automated drone delivery. Grubhub’s drone delivery pilot program deploys Dexa’s fully automated DE-2020 drone, which is certified in accordance with the Federal Aviation Administration’s Part 135 Package Delivery by Drone regulations. It is a state-of-the-art hexacopter that adheres to stringent standards for oversight and sustainability. Simply put, Grubhub’s drones surpass consumer models like the Antigravity A1 8K 360 we assessed. Whether you should rely on it as a food delivery robot remains uncertain.