Walmart partners with Zipline to test limited on-demand drone deliveries

Walmart is teaming up Zipline to test drone delivery early next year, as the world’s largest retailer continues to explore the future of on-demand delivery. Yahoo Finance’s Julia La Roche weighs in.

Video Transcript

ADAM SHAPIRO: It's not just the future of work, Julia. It's also the future of delivery. For instance, we've got UPS teaming up with CVS to deliver product. You've also got Amazon with a drone delivery program like UPS's. And now Walmart. Tell us more about their teaming up with Zipline.

JULIA LA ROCHE: Yeah, so just last week, Walmart announced that they were piloting a drone delivery program for select items in Fayetteville, North Carolina. And that program was with Flytrex, an end-to-end drone delivery company. This week they are now trialing with a Zipline. Let me give you a little bit context about Zipline. It was founded, I believe, and officially founded in 2014. And this is a company that is known for making medical supply drops, specifically blood in Rwanda. Back in 2016, they were delivering and I believe still continue to deliver, critical medical supplies in hard to reach areas. And we're talking about very mountainous terrain, very poor roads, very few roads that are paved. And again, winding roads.

So using this drone delivery technology, they've delivered more than 200,000 products to thousands of medical clinics across multiple countries. So it's interesting, Walmart is going to be trialing with Zipline in northwest Arkansas, which of course, is Walmart's home base. And Walmart's Senior Vice President of Customer Product, Tom Ward, put out a blog post. He said, look, it's pretty cool technology that Zipline operates, and that they can operate from a store in a 50 mile radius.

And to give you some context, he said that is about the size of Connecticut. And again, referencing the work that this company has done around medical supplies deliveries in Rwanda, he basically made a case that this is something that could have the potential for national scale. Maybe it's a little too early at this point, but this is something that'll be really interesting to watch. For now, they're going to start with health and wellness products with plans to extend into more general merchandise. So pretty exciting area, whether it's Walmart, Amazon, the future of on demand delivery, guys.