I f some Amsterdam entrepreneurs have their way, this dilemma will soon die out thanks to the Coffee Copter, a drone built to bring cups of fresh, handcrafted coffee to the caffeine-needy right where they work.
When Starbucks announced this fall that it would soon be offering delivery to select customers in the U.S., Dutch media went abuzz—and turned local attention to this video of Dutch-invented Coffee Copter’s test flight through A-Lab, a former Shell laboratory repurposed as an office space in Amsterdam Noord.
The video begins with the tap of a finger. An office worker places an order via the Coffee Copter app, and the request is instantly transmitted to the café on the building’s ground floor. The barista makes the drink—rosetta everlovingly included—and then places the lidded paper cup on the waiting drone, docked at the bar. Rotors spin and off it goes, flying away, up two flights of stairs, down a hall and into an office room, where an H-marked landing pad receives the gentle touchdown. Human hands retrieve the goods.
Karina Hof is a freelance writer and editor based in Amsterdam. This is her first piece for Sprudge.com
Other refinements have yet to be thought through. Weight capacity and speed will determine which beverages make suitable cargo. Van Luttervelt acknowledges that the Coffee Copter’s one-minute test flight would not do justice to espresso.
“Milk-based drinks or filter coffees,” he stresses, are the best choices for drone delivery.“Filter coffees, they develop their flavor pattern when they cool down, so the transportation time would be ideal to serve the coffee and drink it directly, at its best possible flavor.”
Plus, the drone is meant to carry multiple cups. “Every coffee has its own size and its own weight, so that’s quite a challenge, to balance all the different combinations,” says De Koning. The designer’s wishful thinking? An evenly weighted order of four double espresso macchiatos, every time.
To get the Coffee Copter literally off the ground, though, investors are needed. The project, with ambitions to apply its perfected standards to other technology, is currently a labor of love, done in the collaborators’ spare time.