Residents of the San Francisco Bay Area may soon get their meals, grocery items and over-the-counter drugs delivered by drone, with last-mile delivery company Wing announcing that it’s rolling out its drone delivery service to the region in the coming months in a blog post on Monday.
Wing — a last-mile drone delivery company under the umbrella of Alphabet, which also owns Google and driverless taxi service Waymo — describes the arrival of its aerial deliveries in the Bay Area as a “homecoming,” alluding to its fledgling years as a Google experimental X Labs “moonshot project” testing drone deliveries across Google’s Mountain View campus in 2012.
In 2018, Wing was spun off into an independent company and began making deliveries in the Dallas-Fort Worth area in 2022. It has since expanded operations to include deliveries in the Atlanta, Houston and Charlotte, North Carolina, markets, with plans to expand to more major cities that will make drone deliveries possible for around 40 million people. To date, Wing says its drones have made over 750,000 residential deliveries across the US and Australia.
Wing’s drones use a hybrid vertical take-off, fixed-wing design to automatically pick up and deliver packages weighing up to 5 pounds to customers, typically within a 6-mile operating radius of their base, dropping their payload right into a customer’s yard with the aid of a motorized tether. Customers access the service via the Wing app, where they can request items for delivery in as little as 10 minutes.
Wing’s partnership with Walmart helps expand the footprint of its delivery network and the products available.
A partnership with Walmart announced earlier this year gives Wing access to the retail giant’s inventory of groceries, retail items and over-the-counter medicines, as well as use of its parking lots as distributed bases for drone charging and package pickup — expanding the footprint of its delivery network. A similar DoorDash partnership brought food and drink delivery to the service.
Monday’s announcement doesn’t specify which Bay Area neighborhoods will be the first to receive their eggs or phone chargers via drone, nor when the service is expected to roll out. Eager San Francisco residents — as well as residents of Cincinnati, Los Angeles, Miami, St. Louis, and Tampa and Orlando, Florida, which have also been announced as future Wing delivery markets — can sign up for updates on Wing’s website to be alerted when aerial deliveries come to their area.
