Deliveroo Is Betting on Helicopter Food Delivery

Deliveroo really will try everything at least once

Restaurant delivery platform and expert middlemen Deliveroo will introduce a helicopter dining experience that flies a lucky few over London to eat fast casual chain standards like Wagamama and Chipotle. They say the experience — on Roocopter One — is worth an estimated £149 per person. It’s free, for now. Deliveroo is calling it “the highest restaurant in Europe.” To be clear: it is not a restaurant. It is a teal helicopter laden with delivery food.

A 9 August trial will be “a free experience for consumers” and has sold out; Deliveroo says it plans to roll the flights out across Sydney, Hong Kong, and Edinburgh: it genuinely sees this as a potential international expansion vehicle. The company is also “exploring how the Roocopter One could be used as a delivery vehicle in the future, to reach remote rural areas that are not currently served by the core food delivery offering.”

The latter part of the strategy could be planning for Boris Johnson’s no-deal Brexit hellscape, in which cheeseburgers and pizza can still reach the remaining inlets of civilisation. With the delivery company recently testing restaurant supply chain monopolisation and supermarket pizza delivery, Roocopter One reaches even further into that dark realm, where no idea is a bad idea.

3:55p.m., 31 July: This story has been updated to clarify that the £149 figure is an estimated cost at this stage, and not a future price for the Roocopter One experience. For now, it is free.

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