What used to take up to an hour now takes five minutes. This month, iFood activated its first drone delivery route in Barueri, one of the areas of Greater São Paulo where the most orders were lost due to the difficulty of accessing large residential condominiums. The air route covers 3.6 kilometers and connects the Iguatemi Alphaville shopping center with the destination points.
A logistical problem with an aerial solution
Barueri concentrates residential complexes where delivery people wait long minutes at the entrances before being able to enter. Half of the orders destined for the area ended up not being delivered. Restaurants and users were left out of service just at the times of greatest demand.
iFood’s response was to change the route, not the delivery person. A drone covers the most complex section of the journey while a courier or the autonomous ADA robot picks up the order at the restaurant, and another delivery driver completes the delivery at the customer’s door.
The technology behind flight
The drone is developed by Speedbird Aero, a Brazilian company with which iFood has been working since 2019. It flies at 50 km/h, withstands winds of up to 55 km/h and light rain, and generates around 70 decibels in flight, the equivalent of the ambient noise of a busy restaurant. Each operation is monitored in real time from a control center in Franca, São Paulo.
The authorization to fly over densely populated residential areas was a process through the ANAC in December 2025, when for the first time in Brazil they granted a permit for areas with up to 5,000 inhabitants per square kilometer.
From Sergipe to São Paulo
iFood did not arrive in the capital of São Paulo without experience. Before the deployment in Barueri, the company operated a route in Sergipe where a 36-kilometer land route was replaced by a flight of less than four minutes. More than 5,000 orders delivered later, the model proved it worked.
São Paulo is the next level by containing greater density, greater volume and greater visibility. If the operation scales, it could redefine last-mile logistics in Latin America’s largest city.
