Walmart announced a delivery partnership with Dunkin' through its new Walmart Restaurant Delivery service, expanding a program that began with Subway and putting the retailer in direct competition with DoorDash and Uber Eats.
Walmart is expanding into restaurant delivery, announcing a partnership with Dunkin' that positions the nation's largest retailer as a direct competitor to DoorDash and Uber Eats — and signaling its ambitions extend well beyond its own store walls.
The retailer said this week it will begin delivering Dunkin' products to customers' homes through a new service called Walmart Restaurant Delivery, which debuted earlier this year with Subway as its first partner. Walmart plans to extend the Dunkin' program over the next year to include most of the doughnut chain's approximately 10,000 U.S. locations, the majority of which are situated outside Walmart stores entirely.
"We see this as a way to continue adding value and convenience for customers within a shopping experience they already know and trust," a Walmart spokesperson told CNBC. "By pairing restaurant delivery with Walmart's vast assortment, we can create a delivery experience that gives customers more of what they want in one place."
Walmart referred to itself in the Dunkin' announcement as a "rapidly emerging contender in the restaurant delivery business" — language that industry analysts say reflects genuine competitive intent rather than routine promotional copy.
Hongseok Jang, an assistant professor of management science at Tulane University who has studied online delivery, said Walmart's existing customer base, store network, and logistics infrastructure make it a formidable challenger to established food delivery platforms. "To me it seems that Walmart is testing its own delivery system to see if they can handle it, and if it is successful there will be a big competition between Walmart and Uber Eats and DoorDash," Jang said.
The geographic reach underpinning that argument is significant. Ninety percent of Americans live within 10 miles of a Walmart store, according to Jang, giving the retailer a density advantage that delivery-only platforms cannot easily replicate.
Industry observers draw a sharp distinction, however, between Walmart delivering from restaurants inside its own stores and delivering from external locations. Mike Danford, co-owner and chief strategy officer at e-commerce marketing agency Adverio, said the initial Subway rollout — sourced from in-store restaurants — was relatively low-risk. "Delivering from a restaurant inside your own building isn't restaurant-only delivery. It's simply adding one more item to shopping carts off your own shelf," Danford said.
Phase two, where drivers pick up orders from standalone Dunkin' locations outside Walmart's footprint, is a different proposition. "Once you leave your own building, the attachment breaks, and you're essentially running pure delivery economics against DoorDash and Uber Eats, who have already occupied that ground," Danford said.
The economics of an individual doughnut-and-coffee delivery are not the point, analysts say. Danford described a single-serve coffee delivery as "one of the worst baskets in the business — low order value, temperature-sensitive, time-critical." What Walmart is actually pursuing, he argued, is incremental basket size and order frequency. "The doughnut and the coffee aren't the product. They're the reason someone opens the Walmart app at 6 or 7 a.m. instead of once a week to order a few grocery items," Danford said.
Early data from the Subway rollout supports that thesis. Walmart Senior Vice President Greg Cathey wrote in a blog post this week that nearly 65% of restaurant orders placed since the Subway launch were delivered alongside other Walmart items the customer needed quickly, and that one in five restaurant delivery customers were new to the company's Express Delivery service.
Walmart CFO John David Rainey highlighted the category's momentum on the company's second-quarter earnings call, noting that fast delivery — defined as under 30 minutes — grew 48% in the U.S. during the quarter, even as broader sales weakness pressured the stock price.
Whether Walmart can translate that internal momentum into a durable market position against entrenched delivery platforms will depend heavily on how the Dunkin' expansion performs once it moves beyond the retailer's own store locations — a test the company is now openly inviting.
TechEchelon Staff bylines are produced collectively by the newsroom for short, breaking, and wire-style coverage. Longer-form reporting is published under the responsible reporter's name.
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