UPDATE: March 22, 2024: This piece has been updated with additional comment from Wing.
Dive Brief:
- DoorDash and Wing, a drone delivery manufacturer, will offer delivery from a single Wendy’s location in Christiansburg, Virginia, a town of over 22,000 people, as part of a drone delivery pilot program in the U.S., the companies said in a press release Thursday.
- The two firms previously launched a similar pilot program in Queensland, Australia, that eventually expanded to three geographical locations and 60 participating merchants.
- Most customers with a Christiansburg address within 2.5 miles of the Wendy’s location at 2355 N. Franklin Street will be able to select the drone delivery option, Cosimo Leipold, head of partnerships and product at Wing, wrote in an email to Restaurant Dive. Customers must have an open space about six feet in diameter, like part of a driveway or a lawn, to receive a delivery. DoorDash estimates the deliveries will usually get to customers within about 30 minutes.
Dive Insight:
DoorDash plans to explore making drone deliveries in other U.S. locales later this year, the release states. The delivery giant claims drone delivery is “a quick and sustainable delivery option for small, short distanced orders.”
Wing manufactures specialized packaging for its delivery operation, Leipold said, but will not comment on the cost. DoorDash is offering $0 delivery fees on drone orders during the pilot.
Wing’s drones can travel at about 65 miles per hour, according to a blog post on the drone maker’s website. Leipold said that the drones have a six-mile, one-way range, and that the fastest delivery they’ve conducted on an order from Wendy’s took seven minutes and 12 seconds from the time the customer pressed order.
Wing started as a project at Google, and has been testing its delivery tech in the region around Christiansburg since 2019. The drones are largely autonomous, according to Leipold, and “plan their own routes, execute missions, and perform their own health checks while in flight.”
After each mission, the drones fly back to a charging pad, Leipold said, enabling them to move from task to task without human intervention. Wing received a Part 135 Air Carrier Certificate in 2019, giving it permission to conduct deliveries beyond the visual range of pilots. Leipold said the company works with the Federal Aviation Administration prior to deploying to new markets. Wing has a delivery partnership with Walmart in the Dallas-Fort Worth area that Leipold said was indicative of its capacity to scale, adding the service there could deliver to “millions” of customers.
Last year saw a number partnerships between brands and drone delivery companies. In September, Papa Johns and Little Caesars began offering delivery from Flytrex drones in several cities, while Charley’s Philly Cheesesteaks began offering drone delivery in Durham, North Carolina, with Flytrex. Sweetgreen said it would work with Zipline to offer drone deliveries in March 2023. Flyby, a competitor of Flytrex and Wing, raised $4 million last year to get its drones to the point where they could complete a whole delivery cycle without human intervention.
Wendy’s has shown interest in using unconventional methods for conveying orders to customers, and announced last spring that it would partner with Pipedream to test underground robots to carry orders from a restaurant to specific parking spots.
