Vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) drones are increasingly recognized as an important solution for last-mile delivery in the food and beverage sector, owing to their rapid deployment capabilities and high operational flexibility. In particular, growing interest in drone delivery services has been observed among fast food and coffee franchises, where rapid delivery is essential due to the time-sensitive nature of food and beverage items intended for immediate consumption. Despite this trend, there remains a lack of research on the structural modeling of flight routes for VTOL drones operating under automatic flight conditions, and on the implementation of first-come-first-served (FCFS) delivery services utilizing predefined flight routes. Accordingly, this study comprehensively describes the operations for food and beverage delivery services using VTOL drones. In particular, it addressed the use of multiple drones to conduct FCFS-type multi-point delivery services along fixed routes suitable for automatic flight.

Food environment has been going through significant changes with the introduction of Information and Communication Technology (ICT). This study was conducted to investigate the current development status of ICT related to food delivery service by analyzing the relevant registered patents according to consumer buying process. Patents registered between 2002 and 2016 were searched with ‘food’ and ‘delivery’ as main keywords through Korea Intellectual Property Rights Information Service (www.kipris.or.kr). The search resulted in 624 patents among which 219 patents were related to food delivery service; 108 patents based on ICT were selected and analyzed. The patents were examined by applicant and year. The patents were classified into the six steps of consumer buying process: ‘need recognition’, ‘information search’, ‘evaluation’, ‘choice’, ‘purchase’, and ‘postpurchase evaluation’. Patents belonging to more than one step were coded to all the corresponding steps. The patents were registered mainly by domestic companies (50.9%) and individuals (35.2%), having shown dramatic increase of registration since 2012. Over 2/3 (67.6%) of the patents were related to the ‘purchase’ step. About 32% were associated with the 'information search' step. Approximately 18% of the patents were relevant to the 'evaluation' and 'choice’ steps, respectively. The numbers of patents related to the 'postpurchase evaluation (13.9%)’ and 'need recognition (12.0%)' steps were relatively low. The current ICTs related to food delivery service in Korea were largely associated with service providers' profit generation rather than consumers' benefit. There is still much room for technology development that could contribute to increasing consumers' benefit.