“Diversification” is a watchword of the nation’s burgeoning drone industry.  As more companies join the competition, many are seeking to find a market advantage by exploring a distinct niche – construction versus agriculture, for example.

But diversification is also appearing in the choice of vendors. Rather than partner with one supplier for all of its operations, some companies are choosing a different vendor for each location.

Take Walmart, which is struggling to get its retail drone deliveries off the ground.

Three years ago, the company chose Virginia-based Drone Up as its partner.  That was a distinct improvement over the retailer’s efforts to develop a drone delivery capability in-house, which largely faltered.

But Walmart deliveries with Drone Up were slow to get underway.  Now, the company is looking to partner with a wider set of suppliers, including Flytrex, Wing and Zipline, three companies with stronger track records and a higher safety rating with the FAA.

Walmart’s partnership with Zipline actually dates to late 2021, when the San Francisco-based drone company, which first made its name in medical supply deliveries in Africa, agreed to assist Walmart with its pilot deliveries in Pea Ridge, Arkansas, near the retailer’s corporate headquarters.

For Zipline, the partnership was the drone company’s first foray into commercial food delivery, an opportunity to expand into a potentially lucrative new niche with a major brand.

But Zipline’s reputation with the FAA was also highly advantageous to Walmart. The retailer was still struggling with safety certifications for drone deliveries that required the aircraft to hover at a low altitude over customer backyards and to remain on station for 30 seconds or more.

Zipline uses a completely different model.  Its fixed-wing drones deliver packages to a designated drop zone via parachute; the aircraft fly high above the zone (300-400 feet) and release their cargo within a few seconds;  they never get close to homes or their residents.

That system seems to work for the Pea Ridge store but that hasn’t kept Walmart from maintaining its partnership with Drone-Up at two other Arkansas store locations, Bentonville and Rogers, where deliveries got underway a little over a year ago.

More recently, Walmart has decided to team up with Wing at store locations in two suburbs north of Dallas-Fort Worth – Frisco and Little Elm.

Wing is well-known for its long history of robust deliveries (200,000 total) in towns and cities across Australia, as well as in Finland.  And in 2019, Wing conducted the first successful commercial delivery operations in the United States – in Christiansburg, Virginia – before most other U.S. drone companies had even commenced their first flight tests.

What’s in it for Wing?  A partnership with Walmart, of course,  But Wing also delivers small store items for Walgreens in the same area and is looking for additional retailers and franchises to support – and not just in Texas.

The same is true of Flytrex, which partners with a larger aviation technology firm Causey Aviation, to deliver food from a number of prominent restaurant chains – including Chili’s and Maggiano’s – to residents of Granbury, Texas.  Residents can order food items off the menus of the two restaurants and have them delivered to their door in less than an hour.

But that partnership hasn’t kept Flytrex from agreeing to make store deliveries to Walmart customers in other nearby towns.

What’s actually happening?  Industry experts say partnership diversification in drone retail delivery is actually a symptom of a larger phenomenon:  to achieve scalability, drone companies are beginning to detach from their formerly exclusive partnerships and in selected hubs, like Dallas-Fort Worth, are making their delivery services available to all comers.

The same pattern will likely appear in other states with Walmart store delivery hubs – including Arizona, North Carolina and Florida.  But for now, Walmart’s exclusive partnership with Drone Up – especially in the company’svhome base of Virgina – is holding.

Ultimately, this is the beginning of a new on-demand delivery model.  Multiple vendors in place in the same geographic area servicing any store that might need them.  A consumer can choose an app for each drone company – or each store – and schedule a delivery.  Whoever confirms first, gets the sale.

Currently, all of the drone companies have their own dashboards monitoring their flights but eventually they may all use a common board with their delivery schedules and routes posted in one place; they’ll even monitor their different flights jointly in real time.

It’s the beginning of an unmanned air traffic management system – dubbed UTM – that will allow for expanded deliveries across longer distances, once the FAA grants Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) authority to more drone companies and more infrastructure to support a wider network of remote delivery hubs is in

place.

We’re not there yet, but as diversification continues, and consumer demand grows – Walmart is over 12,000 deliveries and counting – it’s only a matter of time.

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