By John Harrington
DTN Livestock Analyst
With recreational drones flying off the shelves, letters to Santa need to be mailed pronto. If estimates of nearly a million requests this season for the cool tech toy turn out to be accurate, the old boy stands to lose his Christmas cheer PDQ.
Personally, I “overnighted” my entire list to the North Pole several weeks before Thanksgiving, a rather long petition topped by a sweet little bird built for speed and equipped with a 4K UHD video camera. Assuming the local elves play ball and the neighbor’s threat of a privacy suit is just talk, homeland security at the Harrington spread will soon be kicked to a whole new level.
Of course, as enriching as spymaster fantasies may be for American retailers over the next several weeks, the new era of the drone involves a much greater potential. Part of this bigger picture is surely tied to its commercial application, especially its promising use in the delivery of prepared food.
If you think such an idea springs more from the world of sci-fi than serious symposiums at Wharton School of Business, you haven’t been listening to the dreamers and visionaries at the likes of Amazon and Walmart. And I’ll bet you my first fine from the FAA that somewhere in the bowels of corporate headquarters, fast-food scientists and marketers are poring over plans to revolutionize product delivery.
McDonald’s may not yet have the wherewithal to make it rain hamburgers, but I’m pretty sure that a huge squadron of order-dropping drones will take to the skies sometime in the company’s future. Such confidence is based as much on the necessary march of convenience vis-a-vis meat consumption as the incredible track record of technology itself.
Sometimes future possibilities can best be imagined by recalling bygone realities, water under the bridge that seems to be coursing in a definite direction. Accordingly, let’s land our drones for a minute and think back to simpler times — real simple.
The year is 10,000 B.C. with the Neolithic Revolution knocking on the doorstep of Mesopotamia. Mankind is slowly transitioning from hunting-and-gathering to agriculture. In several thousand years, cattle, hogs and sheep will be domesticated, forming a partnership mutually beneficial to all parties. In exchange for protection against the cruelties of nature, animals will energize man’s diet with the high-protein charge of meat.
Indeed, it was probably early man’s increasing addiction to meat (or so many anthropologists argue) that set the stage for the discovery of innovations necessary for the birth of farming and higher civilization. Only after tapping into the rich protein bank of meat (as opposed to laboring all day collecting nuts and berries) could evolving man develop the brainpower and find enough idle time to fire the engines of technology.
Yet, this fundamental shift in our diet and lifestyle also set in motion a great paradox that continues to baffle to this very day, an ironic interplay involving calories and consumption on one hand, and convenience and consumption on the other.
As technology advanced, the strictly biological need of daily calorie intake decreased. In other words, the more meat man ate, the less he was absolutely required to consume. From the marketing department at the Beef Board, such a model looks like a treadmill from hell.
Now fast-forward to the modern era and consider how the market attempts to arbitrage the ongoing disparity between daily calorie needs (surely an all-time low given the sedentary nature of average employment) and commercial meat production. How do you invent hunger that surpasses the need to replenish calories burned through physical work and basic biological maintenance?
Crudely put, you encourage consumers to accept the risk of getting fatter. And over the last 50 years or so, such invented hunger has been urged by three basic means: relatively low prices, convenience, or some irresistible combination of the two.
I guess that’s why I can see drone technology (or something like it) eventually playing a major role in the business of food production and preparation. Indeed, the current proliferation of food-delivery companies (e.g., DoorDash, GrubHub, Deliveroo) already underscores the same hunger-inventing strategy.
“Not really hungry,” says the heftier consumer of tomorrow. “But if the price is right and I can been spoon-fed by a drone, my belt still has another notch.”
John Harrington can be reached at feelofthemarket@yahoo.com
Follow him on Twitter @feelofthemarket
