DoorDash is testing drone delivery in the U.S. after expanding its partnership with Alphabet’s autonomous drone delivery service Wing.
Customers in Christiansburg, Virginia (a town of roughly 23,000 residents), can now order select Wendy’s menu items for drone delivery. Users with an eligible address who are placing an order from the Wendy’s on N. Franklin Street will see the option for drone delivery on the checkout page. The order is typically delivered in 30 minutes or less by Wing drone, DoorDash said. It wasn’t clear how many homes the pilot will actually serve.
DoorDash and Wing first partnered to bring delivery by drone to Australia in 2022 and have since expanded to three locations in Queensland. “Expanding our partnership with DoorDash and launching in the U.S. is a direct result of the success we’ve seen from our initial collaboration in Australia, where Wing has served tens of thousands of customers via the DoorDash app for over a year now,” Wing’s Head of Partnerships Cosimo Leipold said in a statement.
Wing spun out of Alphabet’s moonshot experimental division, X, to become an independent subsidiary in 2018. Wing said it has completed more than 350,000 drone deliveries on the three continents where it operates. It also partnered with Walmart last August to offer drone deliveries from two stores in the Dallas metro area, where it expected to reach 60,000 homes.
The company recently debuted a new aircraft that is meant to allow it to simplify and streamline larger delivery orders.
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