Our story
We were four hundred metres outside the delivery zone.
SkySlice was founded by two people who could see the pizza place from the parking lot and could not get a hot pizza out of it.
The four hundred metres
In 2022 we worked at Cordell Aerostructures, a composites shop on Airport Road. Priya was a flight controls and autonomy engineer. Marc did structures and airframe. We sat forty feet apart and ate lunch at the same table for two years.
Vitale's drew a five-kilometre delivery circle around their oven on Derry Road. Cordell sat five point four kilometres away. Four hundred metres outside. Not a rounding error, not a technicality anyone could be argued out of — a real line on a real map, with us on the wrong side of it.
We tried everything a reasonable person tries. We ordered to the Petro-Canada inside the zone and drove out to meet the driver, and by the time we were back through the gate it was a cold pizza in a warm car. We ordered to Marc's house and ate at nine. We bought a toaster oven for the break room and learned what a toaster oven does to a crust. Someone proposed moving our desks.
We designed unmanned aircraft for a living. It took us eleven months to notice.
The third attempt
The aircraft was a survey hexacopter borrowed from the inspection department without a great deal of paperwork. The payload system was a cardboard box and an orange luggage strap. The flight plan was drawn on the back of a materials cert.
The first attempt released early and put a large pepperoni face down in the north lot. The second went into the retention pond, which we would like to state was fully recovered. The third worked.
It was eleven minutes old and still too hot to hold. We ate it standing in the parking lot in October. Marc said something we can't put on the website.
What happened next
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January 2024
Word gets around the shop
People started putting in orders. Then paying for gas. Then paying for parts. Within a month there was a laminated sign-up sheet on the break room fridge and a rule that the winch operator eats first.
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April 2024
Sixty-one flights off a roof we did not own
Our landlord asked us to stop, in writing, on company letterhead. We had it framed. It hangs in the lobby of the Brampton facility, next to the aviation certificates that came later and cost considerably more.
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July 2024
SkySlice Aviation Foods Inc.
Incorporated on a Tuesday, between shifts. Our first customer from outside the company was a machine shop two units down who had been watching us through their bay door since the spring. They ordered four pies and asked whether we did Thursdays.
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October 2024
The winch
The hard problem in drone delivery is not flying. It is the last three metres. A landing aircraft needs somewhere flat, clear and legal to put itself down, and most people's homes do not have one. So we stopped landing. The aircraft holds at altitude and lowers the box on a line, and the delivery zone stops being a map of open lawns.
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January 2025
Brampton
Rooftop pads, a maintenance floor, a bonded parts store and enough bench space that the two of us stopped building aircraft on a folding table. Forty-one people by the end of the year, of whom eleven came over from Cordell.
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September 2025
The hundred thousandth box
A Full Pie to a townhouse on Sandalwood, lowered at 6:41 on a Thursday evening by a pilot who did not know what number it was until the floor started clapping. We had spent two years arguing about the last three metres and had now done them a hundred thousand times.
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2026
Oven Fresh Hot & Ready
Every engineer we consulted told us that a stone-deck oven had too much thermal mass to fly. They were describing a weight problem. Weight problems are the only kind we know how to solve.
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Now
Coverage in the area went live this quarter. Brampton still builds every aircraft and still answers the phone, but the zone on the operations display is no longer only Ontario.
From the archive
A few things we kept.
Where we are now
Every aircraft in the air is watched from one room. Flight operations runs the fleet, the weather, the airspace and the ovens, and it runs them the way an airline runs them, because that is the only way anyone has ever found to do this properly.
It is a serious room. There is a whiteboard in it on which someone has written the words four hundred metres, and nobody has ever needed to ask why.
- Deliveries completed
- 412,600
- Coverage area
- 214 km²
- Aircraft in service
- 46
- Median air time
- 7 min 12 s
Figures current to the end of the last full quarter.
About the edge
SkySlice has a delivery zone. Every delivery zone has an edge, and on the other side of that edge is somebody eating a cold pizza and doing the arithmetic on how close they came.
We know precisely what that feels like. We were four hundred metres out.
The zone grows every quarter. We are coming for the edge.
— Priya Raghunathan & Marc Delisle, founders
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