BATON ROUGE - America's first unmanned drive-thru is being manufactured in Baton Rouge and is now on the market.

The new technology, created by Baton Rouge native Speed Bancroft, has been in the works since 2021.

It's called Speedy Eats and it's essentially a huge, drive-thru vending machine with patented features that make it stand out. 

Speedy Eats can take a customer's order and give it to them all by itself with no employees operating it. The food will be locally prepared, meal-prep style, by food vendors and placed inside the machine about once a week, Bancroft said. Once inside the machine, customers can order through the app or in person.

"We have salads, wraps, cold-cut subs, we have a good variety of products that you can pull from," Bancroft said.

Bancroft says the machine can also automatically throw expired products away and microwave food.

He says the biggest deficit in the food market is staffing, and this solves that problem.

"It allows an operator to have a hub and spoke model, not have to go through the obstacles of managing a staff and it's a profit center from an operator that can limit itself to high volume because it's placed out on the road where the traffic is," Bancroft said.

This first-of-its-kind project has been picked up by Louisiana entrepreneur Tance Hughes, who is placing it in Natchez, Mississippi.

"I've been following Speed and the development of this technology for the last few years and I really love the way it has so much automation. It makes it really easy for the operator to profitably scale a business and not have to manage as many employees with the high labor cost and everything of that nature," Hughes said.

Hughes says he hopes to bring the invention to the capital region soon.