Warehouse drones are quietly transforming alcohol distribution across America

Inside a Southern Glazer's Wine & Spirits distribution center somewhere in the American Southeast, a drone is doing the work nobody wanted to do. It's 2 a.m. The warehouse is dark. The Corvus One — a four-prop, camera-laden autonomous flying machine — lifts off and begins threading its way through aisles narrower than most people would try to walk. When it finishes its run, Southern Glazer's will know exactly how many pallets of bourbon and which lots of cabernet are actually in the building, not just what a spreadsheet says should be there.

Southern Glazer's, the largest wine and spirits distributor in the United States, has now deployed more than 40 Corvus One drones across nine of its distribution centers over 18 months, according to a joint press release issued March 24 by Corvus Robotics and Southern Glazer's. The drones have completed approximately 5,000 autonomous flights and identified more than 35,000 verified inventory discrepancies across those facilities. The company says the system has contributed to a 100 basis point improvement in cases-per-hour throughput — and that each site has reallocated roughly 60 to 70 labor hours per week from manual cycle counting to higher-value work.

Those are the numbers. Here is the asterisk: all of them come from a co-branded press release issued by the vendor and the customer together. No independent auditor has confirmed the throughput figure. No third-party has verified the discrepancy count. The labor-hours figure describes a reallocation — what happened to the workers who used to spend those hours counting pallets is a question the press release does not answer.

"Inventory accuracy at that scale has meaningful downstream impact," Karli Sage, Vice President of Supply Chain Management, Technology and Engineering at Southern Glazer's, said in the press release. "Our teams are focused on proactive problem-solving instead of reactive counting." Jackie Wu, CEO and co-founder of Corvus Robotics, framed the nine-facility deployment as a signal that autonomous inventory drones are graduating from theater to infrastructure. "Scaling to nine facilities with more than 40 drones demonstrates strong operational buy-in and sets a new benchmark for how beverage distributors can modernize inventory control without slowing the floor," Wu said.

The Corvus One flies without GPS, Wi-Fi, or beacon infrastructure — it navigates using a learned world model and 14 onboard cameras, working in aisles as narrow as 50 inches and operating lights-out in dark warehouses. Mohammed Kabir, Corvus's co-founder and CTO, who built the first drone prototype in his MIT dorm room, described the core technical challenge in a 2024 MIT News interview: "Drones actually only solve a part of the inventory problem... Products arrive, they get taken off a truck, and then they are stacked on the floor, and before they are moved to the racks, items have been lost." That is an honest caveat from the company's own co-founder, and it is worth holding onto when the pitch deck language starts to sound like a comprehensive solution.

The company has real institutional backing. Marc Tarpenning, co-founder of Tesla and a partner at Spero Ventures, invested in Corvus's $18 million Series A round in October 2024. S2G Ventures co-led the round. Honeywell integrated its SwiftDecoder barcode-decoding software into the Corvus One in March 2025, a partnership that gave the startup an enterprise validation signal even as it was still scaling. Corvus has raised $28.1 million total, per company database Tracxn, and competes against 26 other active companies in the warehouse drone space, including Gather AI and Verity.

The broader market context is real and growing. The global warehouse drone market was valued at $4.04 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $7.2 billion by 2030, per a January 2026 market report published on GlobeNewswire. The market is expected to grow at a 12.4% CAGR through 2026, with a 12.2% CAGR projected through 2030. Labor shortages in logistics and supply chain have been a persistent driver — David Barker, President of Honeywell Productivity Solutions, said in a March 2025 release that "companies are looking for solutions to supplement their human workforce."

Nine distribution centers is a meaningful number. Southern Glazer's operates in 47 US markets and Canada. The current deployment covers a fraction of the network — this is not a national rollout, it is a proof of concept that has grown substantially in scope. The press release says continued expansion is planned, but offers no specifics on timeline, facility count, or investment.

The 60-to-70 labor hours per week figure is the part that deserves the most scrutiny. In a distribution network the size of Southern Glazer's, that hours-per-site number compounds quickly. But "reallocated" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Whether those hours represent workers who were retrained and reassigned, workers who were not replaced when they left, or something else entirely is not in the press release, and neither Southern Glazer's nor Corvus responded to a request for comment on workforce implications before publication.

Warehouse inventory drones are not a new category. Intel, IKEA, and DJI have all run similar deployments. What is changing is the maturity of the autonomy stack — Kabir's point about learning-based navigation rather than pre-mapped infrastructure is a genuine technical distinction from earlier generations of warehouse drones. The lights-out operation capability, if it holds reliably in production, is a meaningful shift from systems that require lighting, RFID tags, or human-spotters.

The question for anyone watching this space is not whether the drones fly. They clearly do. The question is what happens when the count is done and the number is wrong anyway — and what happens to the person who used to be the one walking the aisle with a clipboard, now that the drone has taken their 60 hours a week and turned it into something else.

Southern Glazer's is the biggest player in US beverage alcohol distribution. Whatever it standardizes on matters for the supply chains that feed bars, restaurants, and liquor stores coast to coast. Nine DCs is not a revolution. But the direction of travel — from quarterly manual counts to biweekly autonomous ones, from spreadsheet inventory to time-stamped visual records — is real, and it is accelerating.