Wing, Walmart tout drone delivery efforts at NRF 2024

As technology continues to shape the world of retail, Walmart is investing heavily in its drone delivery capabilities.

At the recent NRF 2024 "Big Show" in New York City, Adam Woodworth, CEO of Wing, and Prathibha Rajashekhar, SVP of innovation & automation at Walmart U.S., spoke about the companies’ partnership and how drone delivery will evolve going forward. This followed an announcement at the recent CES 2024 consumer technology conference in Las Vegas from Doug McMillion, president and CEO of Walmart Inc., that the retailer would be expanding a 30-minute drone delivery pilot with Wing, the on-demand drone delivery provider powered by Google’s parent company Alphabet, to 1.8 million additional households in the Dallas Fort-Worth metroplex. 

In 2022, Walmart expanded last-mile drone delivery in Arizona, Florida and Texas through a partnership with DroneUp after successful a three-store pilot in Arkansas the previous year.

“We will be able to reach 75% of the Dallas-Fort Worth metro population with drones,” said Rajashekhar. “What started out as a novelty has become a solution for real needs. It [drone delivery] is solving real-world problems where immediacy is required.”

Both Rajashekhar and Woodworth touted the speed of drone delivery as a key benefit of the service, citing last-minute ingredient needs while cooking and buying medicine for a sick child as two examples of its practicality. 

“People have had all sorts of ideas for probably a decade about what drone delivery might look like, about how drones can be leveraged in commercial applications,” said Woodworth. “And we're finally at the part in that journey where people are actually using the services and it's not just a game of ‘what ifs’ anymore.”

In addition to the convenience and initial novelty on the consumer side of the delivery, Woodworth added that drone delivery is both eco-friendly and efficient for Walmart. Drone delivery allows for small, lighter orders to be “rightsized” and delivered through a faster and more efficient method. At a typical Walmart Supercenter, about 75% of the 120,000 items fit the weight and size requirements for drone delivery, which allows for greater adoption of the technology going forward.

“A lot of these items are one or two pounds, you're not putting it into a multi thousand pound vehicle, you're putting it into a 10 pound airplane,” said Woodworth. “And so when you rightsize the vehicle with the item you're transporting, all those pieces get put together.”

As Walmart continues to grow its drone program, Rajashekhar said that customers’ reception has been positive, and that more consumers will be able to experience the convenience of drone delivery. 

“We are on a good start, and customers are loving it and are using the service,” said Rajashekhar. “We have 4,700 stores at Walmart within 10 miles with 90% of the U.S. population, so a lot of people can get access to this convenience. I'm curious to see how this will evolve and how we can actually bring drone delivery to the forefront, not because it's cool, but because it becomes an essential part of how we do business."