Flying Cheese

Over the years, I have seen a number of very odd food concepts taken to market with varying results. I can still recall the infamous “Space Food Sticks” marketed during the early 1970s, when everyone I hung out with was a least a little caught up in the hype surrounding the Apollo missions. I’ve seen dozens of things covered with batter and deep-fried, from cheese and hot dogs to Twinkies and Snickers bars. I’ve seen chocolate brushed, sprayed and coated on products where chocolate should never go. I’ve seen foods that explode when they come into contact with your mouth, hot sauce so potent it can literally cause tissue damage, and packaged vegan brownies that were complete unchanged by being stepped on and then molded back into shape (fortunately, the plastic wrapper didn’t break). But I don’t think I’ve seen a concept so completely insane, and yet so appealing, as the idea of a flying grilled cheese sandwich…

I picked up the story from the Huffington Post article about them, but you can visit the company’s own website here if you want to. There isn’t a lot of information about them online, but the basic idea is you pay for a sandwich online (it’s $5) and then go to a location marked with an “X” on a street corner – the location of which will be revealed to you after you pay your money. A short time later a small orange parachute with a sandwich attached will float gently down from the sky, where you can grab it. The company says that if you sandwich gets caught on something on the way down, or otherwise fails to show up, they will “probably” make you another one – but it’s hard to imagine any entrepreneur losing public relations, let alone potential repeat customers, by failing to replace product that happens to get stuck in a tree…

It’s not clear how serious these people are about the company, which they call Jafflechutes – a “jaffle” is Australian slang for a grilled cheese, and they drop them via parachute, hence Jafflechutes – but assuming a customer base with sufficient whimsy there’s no reason this couldn’t work. All you would need is a kitchen located in the upper floors of a building somewhere with a significant population density (the North American location they’re talking about expanding into is New York City, naturally) and a city government which is prepared to be lenient about litter from miss-delivered sandwiches. The business model isn’t functionally different from any other quick-service restaurant with an unusual delivery method, and we have already seen other gravity-based systems (e.g. chutes, elevators, rolling trays) used in this role. There are even restaurants already in operation where all ordering and payment transactions are handled via touch screen on the tabletop, and you have no personal interaction with the employees…

Personally, I was a little disappointed when I saw the details of the operation in the online articles. When I saw the headline I had envisioned a fleet of drone aircraft, possibly akin to the quadracopter drones Amazon is supposedly looking into using for a delivery fleet, soaring over the rooftops of a major city and then releasing sandwiches from an internal cargo bay when they reach the specified GPS coordinates. And once that technology is up and running, I can’t see any reason why the unmanned, jet-propelled, laser-guided, self-chilling beer keg that the Aussies (and the U.S. Marines) have been asking for over the last few decades wouldn’t be possible…

For now, I suppose we should probably just keep watching the skies. Although, if you find yourself standing on an otherwise unexplained “X” on the pavement, you might also want to keep a glass of milk or a cup of tomato soup handy…