DoorDash and Wing have announced the launch of their drone delivery partnership in the U.S., starting in Christiansburg.
Select local consumers will be able to order eligible menu items from Wendy’s® — the pilot’s first restaurant partner — through the DoorDash marketplace and have them delivered via drone. This follows the drone delivery pilot program that DoorDash and
Wing launched in Australia in 2022 and has since expanded to three locations in Queensland with over 60 participating merchants, marking the first time that Wing integrated its drone delivery service within another marketplace.
“We are excited to expand our partnership with Wing in the U.S. to integrate drone delivery into DoorDash’s ecosystem,” said Harrison Shih, Senior Director of DoorDash Labs.
“At DoorDash, we are committed to advancing last-mile logistics by building a multi-modal delivery platform that serves all sides of our marketplace. We’re optimistic about the value drone delivery will bring to our platform as we work to offer more efficient, sustainable, and convenient delivery options for consumers.”
Cosimo Leipold, Head of Partnerships, at Wing said this expanding partnership with DoorDash and launching in the U.S. is a direct result of the success Wing has seen from our initial collaboration in Australia, where the company has served tens of thousands of customers via the DoorDash app for over a year now.
“Wing has now made over 350,000 deliveries across three countries and looking ahead we are focused on providing a fast, affordable and safe service to our partners so they can better serve their customers. This moment continues our meaningful expansion of this service in the U.S. and advances our shared goal to better the last-mile delivery ecosystem,” he said.
Beginning this week, when DoorDash customers with an eligible address in Christiansburg place a qualifying order in the DoorDash app from the Wendy’s located at 2355 N. Franklin St., they will see the option to have their meal delivered by drone on the checkout page.
Once they select drone delivery and place their order, it will be prepared and packaged at the Wendy’s location and delivered via a Wing drone, typically in 30 minutes or less.
Christiansburg and Wing have been a partner for the past five years. Wing’s service in Christiansburg was the first in the U.S. to deliver goods directly to residences on demand. That made it the litmus test for whether drone delivery — a ubiquitous fixture of an imagined high-tech future — was viable in the present.
Small packages traveling short distances — the proverbial “last mile” — account for a large segment of urban deliveries. For these trips, drones are generally quicker and safer than ground transportation, and have a lighter carbon footprint. A study by researchers at the Center for Economic and Community Engagement in Outreach and International Affairs found that after five years of operating in a large city, a hypothetical drone delivery service would reduce vehicle miles enough to eliminate up to 580 crashes and 113,000 tons of CO2 every year. Customers would save time, businesses would increase revenue, and social benefits like improved access to prescription medication would raise the overall quality of life in the community.
Turning that ambitious idea into a real service delivering real snacks and sunscreen and coffee in a real city meant clearing some daunting engineering and regulatory hurdles. The service in Christiansburg was made possible by tens of thousands of test flights all over the world and exhaustive testing with Virginia Tech to build up the volume of safety and performance data required to clear the high bar the FAA had set for approval of the new technology.
“Christiansburg is in many ways the birthplace of U.S. drone delivery,” said Jonathan Bass, Wing’s head of marketing and communications.
Through this new partnership, DoorDash says it aims to provide access to an innovative delivery solution for consumers and merchants, complementary to traditional Dasher-fulfilled orders.
The new offering provides a quick and sustainable delivery option for small, short- distanced orders while creating the potential for incremental order growth across the platform.
The pilot will initially be available in Christiansburg with plans to explore other cities in the U.S. later this year.
The drone delivery partnership with Wing was born out of DoorDash Labs, DoorDash’s robotics and automation arm. DoorDash sees automation as a means to develop the right platform solution to satisfy consumer demand, while improving efficiencies within the platform.
Staff report
