DoorDash and drone delivery service Wing will do their best Santa Claus impression this holiday season by delivering goodies by air from malls in the Dallas area.
The program announced Wednesday will include more than 50 restaurants and retailers at two malls: Stonebriar Centre in Frisco and Hulen Mall in Fort Worth. Both are owned by the large mall operator Brookfield Properties.
Customers in the delivery zone who use DoorDash to order from one of the eligible businesses will have the option to have it brought to them by drone. Wing’s "highly automated" drones can complete deliveries in as little as 15 minutes, reaching speeds of up to 65 miles per hour, the company said. Upon arrival, the drones lower packages to the ground from a height of about 150 feet.
The delivery radius will be about 4 miles, a Wing spokesperson said. Residents can check their eligibility for delivery at wing.com/doordash.
Wing is owned by Alphabet, the parent company of Google.
It is the first time drone delivery has been offered by an American shopping mall, Wing said. It represents another step forward for the emerging technology, which has been tested by a handful of restaurant chains, including Panera, Jet’s Pizza and Mendocino Farms.
Drone delivery is intriguing for its ability to move items faster and theoretically more cheaply than humans in cars. But it is still subject to strict regulations and can require some human oversight. The machines' payload capacity is also limited.
The mall program builds on DoorDash and Wing’s existing partnership, which launched in 2022 in Australia and came to the U.S. earlier this year in Christiansburg, Virginia.
Founded in 2012, Wing also works with about a dozen Walmart stores in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex.
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