  Drones have shown to be useful aerial vehicles for unmanned transport
missions such as food and medical supply delivery. This can be leveraged to
deliver life-saving nutrition and medicine for people in emergency situations.
However, commercial drones can generally only carry 10 % - 30 % of their own
mass as payload, which limits the amount of food delivery in a single flight.
One novel solution to noticeably increase the food-carrying ratio of a drone,
is recreating some structures of a drone, such as the wings, with edible
materials. We thus propose a drone, which is no longer only a food transporting
aircraft, but itself is partially edible, increasing its food-carrying mass
ratio to 50 %, owing to its edible wings. Furthermore, should the edible drone
be left behind in the environment after performing its task in an emergency
situation, it will be more biodegradable than its non-edible counterpart,
leaving less waste in the environment. Here we describe the choice of materials
and scalable design of edible wings, and validate the method in a
flight-capable prototype that can provide 300 kcal and carry a payload of 80 g
of water.
