Wing, an on-demand drone distribution company owned by Alphabet, is spreading its commercial wing with the help of Walmart.
On Thursday, the companies announced plans to deploy drone delivery to more than 100 Walmart stores in five new cities: Atlanta, Charlotte, Houston, Orlando and Tampa. Walmart is also adding wing drone delivery to existing markets in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
The expansion shows Walmart’s increased confidence in drone delivery. Greg Kathy, senior vice president of US transformation and innovation at Walmart, said drone delivery remains an important part of his “commitment to redefine retail.”
“We push the boundaries that are convenient to provide better service to our customers, making it easier to shop than ever,” Kathy said in a blog posted Thursday.
The expansion also shows the turning point of the wing, from Alphabet X graduates to commercial enterprises. Wing partnered with Walmart in 2023 to launch a pilot program and tested on-demand drone delivery in two stores that reached around 60,000 homes in two stores in the Dallas Metro area. It grew into 18 Walmart Supercenters in Dallas-Fort Worth.
The expansion, announced Thursday, is an almost five-fold increase in Wing’s operations with Walmart.
“We’re clearly expanding this business from the pilot and trial stage,” 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. So this is the next big bite of an apple. It’s a much bigger bite than we’ve taken before.”
Woodworth said Dallas-Fort Worth’s pilot program, particularly how it expanded, helped shape Wing’s drone delivery strategy in the retail sector.
“We realized how the expansion works and we’re looking at DFW, and now we’re copying it in more markets,” he added.
Woodworth had no choice but to say whether the Wings were still profitable or when they would. But he said the company is focusing on ways to expand delivery while keeping the costs down. Wing’s hypothesis is to build a business centered around small, lightweight, automated, low-cost planes, aka drones. There are fixed operating costs associated with physical assets such as flight operations and training. The core, and what Wing is trying to navigate, is how to expand the number of drones and flights without adding more personnel.
“The more places you can operate, the more you can fly, the more you can cover those costs. This is a meaningful step in that direction,” he said, adding that the wings are trying to flatten their resources as the scale continues to rise.
Wing is also being pushed into the restaurant’s food delivery sector through its partnership with Doordash. The companies paired up in 2022, starting drone delivery in Australia, and have since worked together with Dallas Forthworth and, more recently, Charlotte.