GNC leans on drones to slash missing inventory

GNC drones – At a GNC warehouse in Whitestown, Indiana, four drones fly scheduled routes overhead to count and track products across more than 2,000 pallets. The company says the more frequent visibility—monthly instead of quarterly—has helped reduce nonshipments from seve

In Whitestown, Indiana, the warehouse day starts with a familiar sound overhead.

Every day. four drones move through GNC’s aisles as workers do the kind of work most people try to avoid: counting and tracking full boxes across more than 2. 000 pallets. The flights are steady, routine, and deliberately scheduled—because for GNC, the point isn’t just seeing shelves. It’s making sure product that systems say is in stock can actually ship.

Bill Monk, GNC’s vice president of distribution, described the effect in blunt terms. “If you don’t know where it is, you can’t ship it,” he said.

GNC is a nutritional manufacturing company, and its warehouse holds a reserve inventory spread across a 250,000-square-foot facility. Before the drones were introduced. GNC’s inventory staff was effectively working on inventory visibility on a slower cadence—getting a full view once a quarter. With drones flying on a regular basis. GNC can obtain a full view of its reserve inventory once a month instead. Monk said.

More frequent monitoring matters because backorders are born from a specific mismatch: inventory systems recording items as in stock even though they’re missing from shelves—or missing from the warehouse altogether. GNC’s drone program is designed to catch that mismatch early, before it turns into orders it can’t fill.

The change has been measurable. GNC started using drones from Corvus Robotics two years ago. Since then, Monk said, nonshipments have fallen from several hundred units a day to around 98.

The drone system doesn’t just report problems. It also shifts what inventory staff spends their time doing. With more discrepancies being flagged and validated through drone imagery and data. GNC’s inventory staffers have more time to investigate and follow up on issues rather than relying solely on manual counts.

Even the path the drones take through the warehouse is built around the environment they’re working in. Jackie Wu, the founder and CEO of Corvus Robotics, said GNC and Corvus schedule the drones so they cover specific areas during their 25- to 30-minute flights.

Wu said the drones carry the “physical AI on board the vehicle that enables us to collect the data and move autonomously in these environments.” She added that the AI is meant to help both the drones and the people working with their output: “The AI is helping the customers with what to do with their inventory data. what to do with the discrepancies.”.

One practical part of that is accuracy. Wu said AI helps the drones with positioning so they can move safely and reliably. The drones also capture images and videos that inventory staff can use to find misplaced products, pallets half-off the rack, and fallen boxes.

Why drones work better than many people expect isn’t just that they can fly—it’s how they “see” and how they’re deployed. Brendan Englot. the director of the Stevens Institute for Artificial Intelligence and a professor at Stevens Institute of Technology. said drones can be networked so they can access the internet and remotely query large AI models. He also explained that networking capabilities can reduce the amount of computing needed on board. allowing drones to fly longer before needing a recharge.

Warehouses, Englot said, also offer a technical advantage: stable lighting conditions and few or no windows. That stability makes it easier to tune computer vision algorithms to a single environment, improving performance.

There’s a human layer too. Englot said AI can make it easier for non-experts to ask questions or provide drone instructions in plain English. He described the value this way: “The language element of these models bridges the gap between an expert robotics engineer and an employee in the warehouse.”

Inside GNC’s staffing model, the drones have changed who does what. Before drones, Monk said GNC’s inventory staff included 20 people, and manual inventory counts were hard to staff because few workers were willing to handle the monotonous work and the undesirable shifts.

After drones were introduced, Monk said employee turnover improved. He also said workers were happier because the drones take over the most grueling part of the job: “it is not a very fun job and it takes a lot of pallets counted to find a needle in a haystack.”

Tammy Lacher, a senior specialist in inventory control at GNC, put it directly. “The drones handle the counting, and our team gets to do more investigative work. It takes a lot of the grind out of the job,” she said. “It’s pretty cool to be working with this kind of technology every day.”

The company didn’t treat the change as a simple replacement of people with machines. Monk said most of the original inventory team members were reassigned to different roles—such as customer service or inventory accuracy in active product-picking areas—or left through attrition. With the drones in place now. one to two inventory team members focus on the reserve inventory area and regularly verify the accuracy of the drones’ data.

“We audit 2% of what the drones said was right, to make sure,” Monk said.

A story Monk shared shows how that auditing works in the real world. Once, a drone showed a location with 600 boxes, contradicting GNC data that documented 60 boxes. “Everybody thought the drone was wrong,” Monk said—but it wasn’t. A staff member had input the wrong box size, eliminating a zero at the end of a measurement.

Still, the system isn’t a magic fix. Drones have limitations, and GNC’s reserve warehouse creates its own challenges.

One limitation, Monk said, is GNC’s plastic-wrapped pallets. He described that reserve inventory is in 70-inch aisles—narrow for drones that are two-thirds of that width and have moving rotors. While the drone sensors can see through plastic for inventory counting. when plastic is cut and flapping. the blades can get caught. sending the drone down.

To get around this, staffers are trained to cut and remove plastic when removing boxes from a pallet. Monk said workers typically scan the aisle for issues before the scheduled drone flies through.

Accuracy has increased significantly, but GNC uses drones only for reserve inventory, which typically includes unopened boxes. Wu said drones cannot look back to see into open boxes that have been picked through. The software can still provide case-level estimating, Wu said.

Even with those constraints, Monk said the drones improved operations in ways he hadn’t predicted. “When you’re not finding a problem for a quarter or six months, you spend a lot of time trying to solve it. The drone expedites that problem,” he said.

In a business where missing stock turns into delayed orders and lost trust, the warehouse change at GNC is less about novelty and more about speed—how quickly problems can be found, corrected, and made shippable.

GNC drones Corvus Robotics inventory accuracy backorders warehouse automation AI robotics Whitestown Indiana reserve inventory nonshipments