When Garrett McCurrach was in 5th grade, he came up with an idea for Starbucks: Allow customers to order their coffee ahead of time using their car’s GPS system.
He got his dad to track down the email address of a higher-up at the company, and the young inventor pitched the coffee giant on his idea.
“No one got back to me,” McCurrach said. “I was super bummed at the time.”
Fast-forward about 15 years, and McCurrach’s idea is now commonplace in restaurants, except with a smartphone instead of a GPS. But his knack for innovation hasn’t gone away. Today, the mechanical engineer and entrepreneur has moved on to solving other logistical puzzles for the industry, like how to best get a meal from the kitchen to a customer’s car.
In 2020, McCurrach founded Pipedream, a startup that uses underground tunnels and robots to move goods. While the company’s long-term vision is to turn its subterranean delivery system into a utility like electricity and water, one of its first use cases is for restaurant pickup. Instead of having to go inside to retrieve your food, or wait for an employee to bring it out to you, Pipedream allows the restaurant to send the food directly from the kitchen to the car via tunnel.
A Pipedream robot makes its way along an underground track. | Photo courtesy of Pipedream
McCurrach has always been obsessed with logistics. He marvels at the ease and convenience of Starbucks pickup. He got goosebumps the first time he used Postmates. He is a self-proclaimed Amazon nerd. “All of our lives are built around, they always have been built around, logistics,” he said.
He wanted to use his engineering background to develop similar logistical leaps. He started thinking about the pain points that exist in last-mile delivery and identified two issues: moving things from inside a building to a customer outside, and moving things from outside into a customer’s home.
In a restaurant pickup context, Pipedream’s target area amounts to a distance of several dozen feet, which today is easily covered by an employee or a customer at just a minor inconvenience. And yet McCurrach believes there’s room for improvement. Pipedream is designed to shorten wait times, free up workers and create a magical moment for the customer.
“I think we discount how the removal of a little friction really changes an experience,” he said.
He believes Pipedream could make pickup more convenient than the almighty drive-thru, where wait times can become unwieldy during peak hours. And he is also looking ahead to a scenario in which restaurants become more automated. In that case, an operation may need a way to get food to customers that requires little or no human labor.
The company has agreements with several restaurant brands, including Wendy’s, which will install Pipedream at an existing location this year.
Wendy's will use Pipedream to serve pickup customers. | Image courtesy of Wendy's
The system itself consists of two portals, one in the kitchen and one in a parking space, connected by an underground tunnel. It also includes a storage unit in the kitchen for keeping completed orders hot or cold. Once a customer arrives and uses their phone to check in, an employee will grab their order and place it in the kitchen portal, where a lift lowers it to a robotic cart waiting below. The four-wheeled bot takes it from there and travels on a track to the outdoor portal, where it hands off the order. The customer then grabs it from a pull-out drawer.
McCurrach declined to reveal how much it costs to install the system. But he said Pipedream has worked to keep costs down for an industry with notoriously narrow margins. And the company is not necessarily looking to make money from its restaurant installations. Instead, it views them as a stepping stone to a wider system that would connect entire cities to underground delivery.
Its first test of such a system is underway in Peachtree Corners, Ga., where Pipedream has connected a retail store to an office building. The robot can travel the 0.7-mile route in less than five minutes, carrying items from the store to the office.
Pipedream delivery on display in Peachtree City, Ga. | Photo courtesy of Pipedream
Pipedream chose to test its technology in Georgia not because it was an easy place to start, but because it was hard. (JFK would be proud.) Georgia gets a lot of rain and has a lot of hills and twists and turns in the landscape. In Peachtree Corners, Pipedream took that challenge head-on, digging its own tunnels and laying its own track to prove it could be done.
It won’t always be that hard, McCurrach said. In the future, Pipedream expects to be able to lease space in existing tunnels to use as highways for its delivery bots. Businesses like restaurants will serve as the first nodes of a larger network. The company is working with cities on building those networks, and it’s also targeting developers, who could offer underground delivery as an amenity in new apartment complexes.
“If you’re in an apartment and you could have Skittles delivered in two minutes, and you can deliver your laundry to the laundromat, that changes the way you view your apartment,” McCurrach said.
And yet the young startup founder has no delusions about underground delivery becoming the end-all be-all of moving goods.
“Logistics will always be multimodal,” he said. “There are a mixture of places where one modality wins outright. … Others win on the margins.”
He has high hopes for other technologies, like self-driving cars and sidewalk robots. And he is especially bullish on drones, which he believes will be making 50% of our deliveries in five years. (To be fair, he admits he loves the airborne robots “to the point that I can’t look at them objectively.”)
Meanwhile, underground promises a number of advantages over the world of terrestrial delivery. With no traffic, pedestrians or weather to impede their progress, subterranean delivery bots can travel faster and move more volume, all while reducing congestion on the streets above.
The downside? “To make that route work, and go to every single place a human is, that’s going to take a long time,” McCurrach said.