It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! It’s a Drone Carrying Seafood?

JD.com, one of China’s largest online companies, hopes to deploy a fleet of drones in Canada to airlift seafood from processing plants to the airport, cutting costs in an attempt to deliver more Atlantic lobsters, prawns and clams to Chinese consumers.

Additionally, the company has plans for a drone network for the Canadian West Coast that could be used to carry local blueberries to cargo aircraft headed for China. It wants to replicate plans for similar drone networks in China, where it believes unmanned aircraft can slash logistics costs by 50 to 70 per cent, according to their CEO Richard Liu.

The company has yet to apply for a license, and  it will need to conduct cold-weather testing before it can launch.

His plan involves JD drones carrying fresh product between a series of drone bases. There, drones would land momentarily to swap their batteries before continuing to an airport, where seafood and fruit could be loaded into a cargo aircraft bound for China.

JD.com figures the drones could cover hundreds of kilometres this way, hopping between bases and believes  squadrons of the airborne couriers could shrink the time between harvest and plate.

The company’s interest in Canada, Mr. Liu said, has been sparked by the comparatively high cost of domestic shipping and small number of airports with connections to China. Canadian seafood today is typically flown from Halifax to Toronto before leaving for Shanghai, Beijing or Guangzhou.

Next year, JD wants to sell roughly $500-million in Canadian goods, about half of it fish and shellfish. It expects to grow sales of Canadian beef and pork, and has plans to begin selling Canadian fresh milk, too. The company’s Canadian beef sales rose 800 per cent this year on Singles’ Day, China’s annual Nov. 11 shopping spree.

Category: General Update, News