Towards the Development of Smart and Sustainable Transportation System for Foodservice Industry: Modelling Factors Influencing Customer’s Intention to Adopt Drone Food Delivery (DFD) Services

While the attempts to deploy drones in the foodservice industry focus on the technical aspects, research studies from behavioral perspectives that support service substantially are still in their infancy. When new technology-based services are introduced, it is crucial to examine and understand consumers’ perceptions by identifying a set of actions that influence acceptance and fulfilling their target. Therefore, service providers of drone food delivery (DFD) services need to identify significant factors that influence potential consumers to use drone delivery. Although a few existing models are significant, these models lack a comprehensive basic theory that addresses factors which influence consumers’ intention and behavior. To overcome this limitation and propose a more comprehensive model, relevant research studies from the domain of drone delivery services and other emerging technology such as IoT, Autonomous Vehicles, and Mobile Banking are identified, reviewed, and analyzed, and ten potential factors are subsequently extracted. This study’s data were collected from 209 participants who regularly order food online for delivery and were analyzed using SPSS. Descriptive statistics, reliability, Pearson correlation, regression analysis, r-squared, and standardized beta coefficient analyses are carried out to present the study’s findings. The results show that there is a significant relationship between behavioral intention and the user behavior of DFD. Although the participants in this study are yet to experience drone technology in the foodservice domain, the identified factors explain around 32.9% of the variation in the use behavior of DFD services. In the early stage of adoption, it is highly recommended for stakeholders to conduct marketing campaigns through media channels such as television and different social media platforms to bring awareness of this technology.