Walmart is about to bring iced coffee and maple doughnuts to your door, and the move is being read as a direct challenge to food delivery incumbents like DoorDash and Uber Eats.
The nation’s largest retailer said this week it will begin delivering Dunkin’ products from its own stores first, then expand over the next year to cover most of Dunkin’s roughly 10,000 U.S. locations—the vast majority of which are not inside Walmart stores. The expansion builds on a similar program Walmart already runs with Subway restaurants located inside its stores.
A new delivery marketplace
Industry experts see the Dunkin’ partnership as Walmart laying down a marker in the restaurant delivery space. Walmart frames it as a natural extension of its existing services, with a spokesperson telling CNBC that pairing restaurant delivery with Walmart’s broad assortment creates a more convenient experience for customers.
The service, called Walmart Restaurant Delivery, debuted with Subway as its first partner. Now Dunkin’ is joining, and the company has described itself as a “rapidly emerging contender in the restaurant delivery business.”
For customers, the pitch is simple: while ordering a latte or cruller, add toilet paper, mouthwash, or socks to the same cart. That bundling is the strategic core, said Hongseok Jang, an assistant professor of management science at Tulane University, who studies online delivery. Walmart’s built-in customer base, physical stores, and logistics network make it a formidable competitor, he said.
“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 economics of doughnuts
Mike Danford, co-owner and chief strategy officer at Adverio, an e-commerce marketing agency, notes that delivering from a restaurant inside a Walmart store is not true restaurant delivery—it’s just adding an item to a grocery order. But the next phase, delivering from Dunkin’ locations outside Walmart’s footprint, is a different beast.
“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.
Standalone coffee and doughnut delivery is among the toughest baskets in the business, Danford added: low order value, temperature-sensitive, and time-critical. “It’s next to impossible to profit on just delivering a single-serve coffee by itself, but that’s not what Walmart is doing. They’re simply attaching a coffee to a grocery order on a trip that was already happening.”
The strategy is about frequency as much as basket size. Groceries follow a weekly or monthly cadence, but coffee can be daily. “That can easily increase the frequency of orders per customer,” Danford said. “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.”
Early traction and hurdles
Walmart has already seen encouraging signs from its Subway test. According to a blog post by Walmart senior vice president Greg Cathey, nearly 65% of restaurant orders were delivered alongside Walmart items. One in five orders that combined Subway and Walmart items were a customer’s first time using Express Delivery, and nearly 30% of those customers returned within 30 days.
On the company’s Q2 earnings call, CFO John David Rainey said fast delivery—under 30 minutes—grew 48% in the U.S. during the quarter, even as broader sales showed some weakness.
But challenges remain. Amrita Bhasin, co-founder and CEO of Sotira, an AI-powered supply chain platform, says Walmart needs to increase delivery density and optimize routing to compete effectively. Rural or off-peak orders could drive up costs. Food delivery also demands speed and reliability that consumers don’t expect for toilet paper.
“Food delivery is time sensitive, and customers have lower tolerance for long wait times, delays or food being cold,” Bhasin said.
R.J. Hottovy, head of analytical research at Placer.ai, a location analytics firm, said the Dunkin’ test could establish Walmart as a restaurant delivery marketplace rather than just a landlord. But its cost structure is fundamentally different from DoorDash or Uber Eats because it runs orders through a network that already fulfills from stores.
“Coffee and doughnuts are low-ticket purchases, but Walmart doesn’t need a $6 Dunkin’ order to work on its own—it needs to attach that order to an existing $80 grocery basket for the economics to work,” Hottovy said.
Source: www.cnbc.com — https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/05/walmart-dunkin-subway-delivery-uber-eats-doordash.html
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