2024: Drones delivering school meals to remote parts of Scotland

In 2023 Argyll and Bute Council in Scotland won COSLA Excellence award for their innovative pilot project to test the use of drones to reach rural and remote schools currently relying on traditional methods of transport to deliver school meals. Ahead of International School Meals Day 2024, Christine Boyle, Senior Manager – Catering, Cleaning, Events and Food Strategy at Argyll and Bute Council, outlines their ambitions for this project.

As a council, we are committed to becoming a net zero organisation by 2045 and looking to reduce carbon emissions across all services where we can. Currently, some school meals are prepared in production kitchens and then transported by van/taxi and ferry to remote schools across the authority.

Argyll and Bute Council has 23 inhabited islands, a remote rural population and complex multi-model transport logistics – so we see drones as a real benefit to help us simplify the current service delivery model.

We have 63 production kitchens providing 78 schools with 1.2 million meals a year.

This project touches upon so much that is relevant in public sector right now like:-

• Forging new innovative relationships with the private sector;
• Reducing fossil fuel reliant travel;
• Stimulating learning, economic development and STEM: and
• Ensuring those in remote areas or islands have equitable access to resources – in this case nutritious meals.

The drone delivery opens up so many options and opportunities for our service. Argyll and Bute is a diverse region, with many pockets of remote locations where school meals are provided on a daily basis. The logistics behind this provision can be difficult to manage and using drones will not only give us the opportunity to deliver meals where there is currently no provision, but we may, in time, be able to streamline our current delivery routes.

Going forward, we are now at the next phase and taking the project to the next level by delivering meals from one school to another. The receiving school don’t currently have a meal service or kitchen. We are working out logistics and deciding what the service model would look like if we were to get the funding; so questions like how often the meals would be delivered, would they be chilled or frozen, or daily hot deliveries. Would they come from a central production or from the closest school, and also what weight can the drones carry, so lots still going on….watch this space!

It was a great achievement for everyone involved in this exciting project which was a UK first. Argyll and Bute is Scotland’s second largest council area with the highest number of inhabited islands. We are committed to making sure our remote and rural communities have access to mainland services and this special project highlights what is possible with our UAV plans. We are still at the start of this journey, and I am sure as we progress we will have lots of learning to share with colleagues across the industry.