Walmart and Wing expand drone delivery to five more U.S. cities

Summary

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 comp...