Matternet wants to rain hot chicken from the sky

Дата публикации: 01-10-2026 10:00:00

Matternet wants to make fried chicken rain from the sky. To do that, the drone delivery company has developed a new version of its last-mile logistics system, which features a drone that carries up to 11 pounds and simpler, lower-cost dock stations. The company is looking to roll out this delivery system in the second half of 2027.
Called the M3, this autonomous architecture puts new, more powerful drones, new drone docks, and drop boxes on the premises of restaurants, retailers, or hospitals. The company’s initial U.S. partner is Dave’s Hot Chicken.
The idea, Matternet CEO Andreas Raptopoulos says, is to turn drone delivery into a utility: “largely invisible, dependable, and low-cost,” something a business connects to “the same way a building connects to water or power.”
Matternet is launching the M3 into a nascent U.S. drone delivery market that’s still plagued by regulatory hurdles, opposition from residents, and availability in a limited number of locations. In the U.S., there are already four major players operating in the space: Amazon Prime Air, Flytrex, Wing, and Zipline.
Amazon, for one, flies from sites in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, Houston, Phoenix, Detroit, and Tampa, carrying up to 5 pounds within 7.5 miles, and plans to reach the suburban communities of nearly 500 cities and towns by the end of 2026. Meanwhile, the M3 is at least nine months from commercial service, and the company has provided no order or route counts.
At the same time, China is going full steam ahead. Beijing is showing the world that the so-called low-altitude economy works. Meituan began exploring drone delivery in 2017 and launched its first commercial service in Shenzhen in 2021. It topped 1 million orders worldwide by the end of June, and recently launched a dedicated McDonald’s route in Shanghai.
Research firms put the global drone delivery market in 2026 anywhere from $360 million to $5.06 billion, with the latter projecting $20.98 billion by 2034.
The race is on, as Chinese companies—backed by a government whose five-year plan aims to commercialize the airspace just above rooftops—are already expanding their technology overseas.
Matternet, headquartered in Silicon Valley, plans to deploy its M3 system in the U.K. by next year, partnering with medical logistics company Apian and its existing National Health Service drone delivery network in Central London.
How it works
The M3 provides a new approach. While Amazon and Walmart fly drones from centralized fulfillment centers and shops, Matternet’s network is decentralized. Any business, from a restaurant to a retailer to a hospital, can “plug” into it. Each merchant will get a dock and portal installed on or near their premises.
Raptopoulos says the number of drones at a merchant depends on how many deliveries per hour it needs to serve, at about four to five deliveries per hour per drone.
Being decentralized means the entire drone fleet can be shared among all businesses in the Matternet system. “Merchants can have dedicated drone fleets and use other excess capacity if needed,” the company tells me. If a store has a demand peak, for example, Matternet’s cloud will reroute any idle drones to that store automatically to cover its delivery needs.
The system has three parts. First there is the drone itself, which the company says can carry up to 11 pounds within a 10-mile radius. It lands in a dock (located on a rooftop or at ground level) that stores and charges it. Then there’s the portal, a freestanding, off-grid drop box where a business’s staff can leave packages. At a Dave’s Hot Chicken, for example, a bagged order goes in the portal; the drone flies to the portal, grabs the bag, and takes it from there.
This set-up removes the empty flights between a central hub several miles away and the merchant’s pickup point, which raises aircraft utilization and lowers cost, Raptopoulos tells me. He claims M3 was designed “to deliver the best unit economics in the industry,” but did not provide a cost per delivery or price for the portal or dock.
Raptopoulos points out that the system is “asynchronous,” so an employee can load the portal when convenient and the aircraft will pick up the packages automatically afterward. This version holds up to three packages; Matternet plans to announce additional portal versions, including variants that let merchants send packages without even stepping outside.
The portal accepts a standard brown food bag, a retailer box, or specialized healthcare packaging. The M3 drone’s cargo bay is said to hold 20 liters (about 5.3 gallons) and measure roughly 14 by 10 by 11 inches. Raptopoulos says each drone completes about four to five deliveries per hour, and the number of drones per hub depends on the target deliveries per hour.
The customer gets an estimated time of arrival, live tracking, and a notification 60 seconds before delivery. A 3-mile route after the bagged order gets placed in the portal takes five to seven minutes to arrive at the customer’s location. Raptopoulos claims the ETA is accurate to within seconds. 
Delivery then happens by tether drop. The drone gets to the point marked by the customer—on a customer’s first order the system offers one or two drop zones, usually the front or back yard—and hovers 30 meters above it, lowering the package on its cable a few steps from the door.
This is a suburbs-focused design: The main B2C market is the single-family suburban home, Raptopoulos tells me, although he claims that dense cities, with more merchants and customers close together, would make M3 even more efficient.
While Matternet says no one needs to control the aircraft’s flight, Raptopoulos tells me the system runs “with central supervision from our airline partners.” That is remote oversight, not a fully hands-off system. He didn’t say what the supervision involves.
Rage against the beehive
Matternet plans to build M3 aircraft in the U.S. and to announce more partners “in the coming months,” focused on high-volume instant delivery in retail, food, and healthcare. The company expects SoftBank Robotics America—a partner since April 2026—to support installation and maintenance of the ground infrastructure at scale.
Still, there are a lot of buts to the future of the company and U.S. drone delivery in general. The first is regulatory. Matternet calls itself “the world’s only FAA Type-Certified drone delivery company,” but that doesn’t let it fly wherever it wants. Today, flying beyond the pilot’s line of sight (BVLOS) takes case-by-case approvals from the Federal Aviation Administration on top of an air-carrier certificate under the FAA’s Part 135. The agency has proposed a rule, Part 108, that would make BVLOS routine.
Raptopoulos calls this proposed rule “a big catalyst for growth” and says it is “expected imminently,” but as of early September the final rule was still pending at the White House regulatory office after missing a February deadline. It could also cut both ways for Matternet. Under the proposal, rivals could get approved without the aircraft certification Matternet has.
The second speed bump is what drone delivery feels like to the people living under it. Companies are discovering that communities don’t want drones buzzing overhead. In Richardson, Texas—where Amazon opened a Prime Air facility in December 2025—some very vocal residents are fed up for good reason.
Resident Scott Bratcher told NBC the noise is “constant—it’s like a beehive up there right over our house.” If you have ever heard a drone flying by, you’d agree. Amazon says the sound is “minimal and short-lived, comparable to a passing car,” and that fewer than 1% of the customer service inquiries it receives about Prime Air are about noise.
But some communities are not having it. Parker, Colorado, imposed a nine-month moratorium on commercial drone-delivery hub applications in July; nearby Castle Rock followed a day later with a six-month freeze; and Cobb County, Georgia, shut down a Walmart-Wing proposal on zoning grounds.
The FAA holds the final say on airspace, and its nationwide finding says delivery drones flown within set noise and siting limits have no significant environmental impact, so new markets may no longer need a separate FAA environmental assessment. Yet that finding is already being challenged by 15 states and Harris County, Texas, in a lawsuit against the FAA filed on September 28.
Like Amazon’s and Walmart’s drones, the M3 delivers to customers’ yards, hovering 30 meters above the drop zone. And the M3 multiplies ground sites compared with centralized operations like Prime Air. Matternet itself lists site and local approvals for its ground infrastructure as a risk, while Raptopoulos says the portal avoids onerous permitting.
In China, there doesn’t appear to be the same kind of backlash so far, possibly because its setup is different in structure. Meituan’s drones deliver to kiosks near residential and office buildings instead of to people’s doorsteps, and each flies a predetermined route from one launchpad to one kiosk. Plus, Meituan has had years to work through public reaction.
In 2023, Mao Yinian, Meituan’s director of drone delivery services, told MIT Technology Review that winning residents’ full trust would take time through education and demonstrations of drones flying.
A McKinsey survey cited in a peer-reviewed study found willingness to use drone delivery above 80% in China, against roughly 50% to 60% in the U.S. and Germany. In the study’s own survey of Chinese consumers, perceived risk pulled urban acceptance down; however, noise wasn’t among the factors tested.
Meanwhile, Meituan’s delivery count went from roughly 400,000 completed drops across 53 routes in December 2024 to more than 1 million orders completed worldwide by the end of June 2026. And Shanghai wants 400 low-altitude routes in operation by the end of 2027, the same period M3 is due to start service.
While growth doesn’t measure communities’ acceptance, a network that keeps expanding at such a rapid rate seems to indicate that the hurdles Matternet and others will be facing have already been cleared on the other side of the Pacific.
We’ll have to wait to see what happens in the U.S. once these services begin to truly spread everywhere. The M3 is at least nine months from flying its first chicken across the sky; the FAA rule that would let Matternet’s system scale was still awaiting U.S. government approval as of early September; and residents across the country are already protesting the proliferation of the low-flying machines. 
So while the M3 drones have not yet arrived at their docks, it looks like there may be some heavy turbulence ahead.

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