Wing, the on-demand drone delivery company owned by Alphabet, is spreading its commercial wings with help from Walmart.
The two companies announced Thursday plans to roll out out drone delivery to more than 100 Walmart stores in five new cities: Atlanta, Charlotte, Houston, Orlando, and Tampa. Walmart is also adding Wing drone deliveries to its existing — and first market — in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
The expansion signals Walmart’s growing confidence in drone delivery. Greg Cathey, who is senior vice president of Walmart’s U.S. Transformation and Innovation department, said drone delivery would remain a key part of its “commitment to redefining retail.”
“We’re pushing the boundaries of convenience to better serve our customers, making shopping faster and easier than ever before,” Cathey said in a blog posted Thursday.
The expansion also marks a turning point for Wing, from Alphabet X graduate to commercial enterprise. Wing partnered with Walmart in 2023 and launched a pilot program to test on-demand drone delivery at two stores in the Dallas metro area that reached about 60,000 homes. It has since grown to 18 Walmart Supercenters in Dallas-Fort Worth.
The expansion announced Thursday is nearly a five-fold increase of Wing’s operations with Walmart.
“We’re decidedly out of the pilot and trial phase and into scaling up this business,” Wing CEO Adam Woodworth told TechCrunch in a recent interview. “We’ve always been the type of company that wants to do something well and stay focused. And so this is the next big bite at the apple. It’s a much bigger bite than than we’ve taken before.”
Woodworth said the pilot program in Dallas-Fort Worth, and specifically how it scaled, helped form Wing’s drone delivery strategy in the retail sector.
“We figured out how the expansion worked out and looked in DFW, and now we’re sort of copy-pasting that across more markets,” he added.
Woodworth wouldn’t say whether Wing was profitable yet or when it would be. But he did say the company is focused on how to scale its deliveries while keeping its expenses in check. Wing’s hypothesis is to build a business centered on small, lightweight, automated, low cost airplanes — aka drones. There are fixed operational costs tied to those physical assets such as flight operations and training. The crux, and what Wing is trying to navigate, is how to scale the number of drones and flights without adding even more personnel.
“The more places you can be operating, the more you can be flying, the more you can you can defray those costs. This is a meaningful step in that direction,” he said, adding that Wing is trying to keep its resources flat as the scale continues to go up.
Wing is also pushing into the restaurant food delivery sector through its partnership with DoorDash. The two companies paired up in 2022 to launch drone deliveries in Australia and have since worked together in Dallas-Forth Worth and more recently in Charlotte.
