Starship Technologies wraps up year with record deliveries

Starship Technologies, the world’s leading provider of autonomous delivery services, has published its 2023 Robot Wrap Up, highlighting the most popular items, interesting stats and quirky requests that its global fleet of more than 2,000 robots have received in the past year.

Going the distance

Starship robots don’t deliver to the moon (yet), but they’ve traveled the equivalent of 30 trips to the moon since starting commercial deliveries in 2018 (11,511,457 km / 7,152,888 miles). In 2023, they completed 16,115,708 road crossings.

While February is the shortest month of the year, it’s all about love for Starship robots as it was the busiest month of the year for deliveries. In fact, February 9th was the busiest day of the year, with 9,639 deliveries that day. Why February 9th? The robots are keeping their lids shut on the details.

Milk and French fries but not pizza

What keeps these robots so busy? It depends on where you live. Milk ranked number one by a large margin in neighborhood deliveries throughout the UK, Estonia and Finland. Bananas topped the UK list in 2022 but didn’t make the top three list this year.

When it comes to US colleges, the focus is on prepared food with french fries again coming in at number one (fries have been at the top of the list since we started compiling these stats in 2021).

Chicken tenders come in second place followed by breakfast sandwiches. The students at East Carolina University (ECU) really love their tenders, as they placed delivery orders for them over 30,000 times.

Here is a breakdown of the most popular food by region:

• Tallinn, Estonia: 1) milk 2) tomatoes 3) Coca-Cola Zero
• UK: 1) milk 2) bread 3) eggs
• Finland: 1) semi-skimmed milk 2) bananas 3) regular milk
• US campuses: 1) french fries 2) chicken tenders 3) breakfast sandwich

Character counts

2023 also marked the debut of Starship robot characters in the UK and US with unique personalities and voice interaction. In the UK, the ‘Sunshine’ character reigned supreme.

It seems as if customers in the UK were looking for a dose of positivity with their delivery. US customers wanted a more formal approach as the British robot “Harry” took the top spot.

The love for Starship robots has been well documented with social media pages devoted to them and customers sending “love notes” after their deliveries.

What better way to show your love than to have them be part of your life? That might be the thinking behind one Oregon State University (OSU) student who placed 382 orders this year.

That’s an impressive number and even more impressive when you consider the fact that most students are not on campus throughout the year. In the UK, the “most orders honor” goes to a customer in Northampton, with 353 orders placed since they downloaded the Starship Deliveries app.

Launches

Starship expanded services to new cities and new campuses this year.

Europe

• Finland: people are now getting deliveries in seven cities with the S-Group
• UK: service has expanded to new neighborhoods including Leeds, Wakefield and Trafford
• In all, 10 cities and 45 stores launched in 2023
• Starship and Bolt announced a partnership for deliveries

US

• 14 campuses launched, serving 1.1 million students
• The business with Grubhub went into overdrive with orders increasing 2,217 percent this year!

Milestones

All of these deliveries had a net positive impact on the environment. In the UK, Starship’s battery-powered robots have saved 309,663 kilograms of CO2 from the atmosphere. That’s equivalent to the absorbent capacity of 15,383 Christmas trees.

The rollout of wireless charging at George Mason University with expansion plans in process (the robots can now navigate directly to their charging stations which increases utilization and efficiency)

A Starship robot completed 24 deliveries in 16 hours, 100% autonomously without any human intervention or oversight (current L5 record).

Earlier this year, Starship robots became the first self driving company to pass the 10 million kms (6 million miles) mark in terms of distance traveled.

Starship Technologies operates commercially on a daily basis around the world. Its zero-emission robots make more than 150,000 road crossings every day and have completed more than five million commercial deliveries globally, more than any other autonomous delivery provider.