Walmart and Wing to expand drone delivery into Houston
By DRONELIFE Features Editor Jim Magill
Walmart and Wing continued the rollout of their drone delivery collaboration, promising to bring the service to 150 additional stores in locations across the United States, reaching 40 million potential customers, over the next year.
The companies plan to open their newest delivery location at a Walmart store in Houston on January 15.
Following the launch of the service, customers will be able to have products such as grocery items, last-minute gifts, household goods and over-the-counter medicine delivered to the homes in as little as 30 minutes from the Walmart Supercenter #1040 in northwest Houston. Area residents can check their address eligibility and join Wing’s waitlist for future expansion at wing.com/walmart.
In an email statement Kent Ferguson, Wing’s head of partnerships, said Wing launched its first UAV service in conjunction with Walmart in September 2023, starting with deliveries to customers in Frisco, Texas.
“Since then, we have expanded service to 20 Walmart stores across the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex,” he said. “Wing and Walmart made drone delivery history in June 2025 by announcing plans to expand to 100 additional stores and five new metros: Charlotte, Atlanta, Houston, Tampa, and Orlando.”
Ferguson said the partners initially had to overcome challenges in order to successfully launch their drone delivery operations.
“Before we could achieve scale, we had to perfect the delivery experience, ensuring our drones could navigate any backyard and deliver items like eggs without cracks and hot coffee without spills. Today, that innovation supports Wing’s seamless logistics partnership with Walmart,” he said.
“With over half of their products now eligible for drone delivery, we’re making it possible for customers to get their groceries, household goods and over-the-counter medicine when and how they want.”
Before introducing Wing’s delivery service to a new community, the company always begins with proactive outreach and relationship-building, he said.
“Before launching in any new market, Wing holds conversations with government officials, business and civic leaders, and community organizations to evaluate local needs and address questions or concerns.”
The process of placing an order for drone delivery is very simple using the Wing app.
“During checkout, you’ll confirm the delivery location on your property, for example in your front or back yard,” Ferguson said. “Then your items will be packed into a box before a Wing delivery drone takes off at your local Walmart store, retrieves the order and then cruises up to nearly 60 mph to your home.”
The drone then gently lowers the package to the ground via a tether and after it completes the delivery, it flies back to its home base location for another mission.
207 locations by 2027
The retail giant and UAV delivery company promised to expand their network to more than 270 drone delivery locations by 2027, stretching their service area across the country from Los Angeles to Miami. This expansion builds on the success their current operations in the Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) metroplex and the Atlanta metropolitan, the partner companies said in a joint statement.
The companies announced that planned expansion cities would include the major metropolitan hubs of Los Angeles, St. Louis, Cincinnati and Miami, with others to be announced later. Previously the partners had announced that drone delivery service would be expanded into the Orlando, Tampa and Charlotte markets.
Walmart finds successful drone delivery model
Over the past half-decade or so, Walmart, in partnership with Wing and other drone delivery partners such as Zipline and DroneUp, has experimented with several different drone delivery projects before developing one of the most successful UAV delivery models in the country.
In 2020, Walmart announced the launch of a pilot drone delivery program in partnership with international drone delivery company Zipline, which pioneered the UAS delivery model by transporting vital medical supplies in Africa. Walmart said the new service would make on-demand deliveries of select health and wellness products from a location near its headquarters in northwest Arkansas, with the goal of expand the scope of deliveries to include general merchandise.
The same year, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Walmart announced another new drone delivery project in partnership with DroneUp and Quest Diagnostics, to deliver diagnostic test kits via drone in Las Vegas.
In the following year, said it would partner with soft drink giant Coca-Cola and DroneUp to launch a service to deliver samples of a new beverage, Coca-Cola with Coffee, to residents of Coffee County, Georgia.
In 2022 Walmart announced ambitious plans to expand its drone delivery services to include six states – Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Texas, Utah and Virginia — by the end of the year. The same year, the retail giant, in partnership with DroneUp, began offering delivery service from 11 store locations in the DFW area.
Walmart joined with Wing, the on-demand drone delivery provider backed by Google’s parent company Alphabet, in 2023. In August of that year, the partners announced the launch of drone delivery service from two Walmart stores in the DFW region.
At the time, through its partnership with DroneUp, Walmart said it had implemented drone delivery service across seven states and 36 stores, completing more than 10,000 secure deliveries.
By 2024, Walmart again announced plans to expand its footprint in Texas, vowing to offer drone delivery service to three-quarters of the DFW metroplex area by the end of the year. The following January, the retail giant announced that, in partnership with Wing and Zipline, it would expand its UAV deliveries to its stores across more than 30 towns and municipalities in the region.
In August of that year, DroneUp, said it would shut down its drone delivery operations conducted in partnership with Walmart in three states: Arizona, Utah and Florida. The company said it instead planned to focus on flights in the DFW area, where the economics for growth were more favorable.
Walmart then terminated its partnership with DroneUp and reportedly divested its stake in the company. Despite initial success after its launch in 2021, the collaboration had struggled with high costs and logistical barriers. Walmart, however, continued to successfully grow its UAV delivery business through its partnerships with Wing and Zipline.
Last December, Wing and Walmart have announced the expansion of their UAV delivery service partnership with the opening of six new delivery hubs in the metropolitan Atlanta region.
Jim Magill is a Houston-based writer with almost a quarter-century of experience covering technical and economic developments in the oil and gas industry. After retiring in December 2019 as a senior editor with S&P Global Platts, Jim began writing about emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, robots and drones, and the ways in which they’re contributing to our society. In addition to DroneLife, Jim is a contributor to Forbes.com and his work has appeared in the Houston Chronicle, U.S. News & World Report, and Unmanned Systems, a publication of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.
Are these delivery UAVs fully autonomous, and assuming they are licensed for BVLOS use, how is obstacle avoidance being handled?