Finland’s weather is notoriously hostile. but even so, your food order can be delivered by drone.
A rainy day after the Helsinki annual Mud conferenceFinnish entrepreneur Ville Leppälä took TechCrunch behind the scenes of a three-way partnership between Irish drone delivery company Manna, DoorDash-owned food delivery platform Wolt and his own startup, Huva.
Huuva, whose name means kitchen hood, seeded with General Catalyst in 2022 with the promise of bringing fine dining to the suburbs. While it branched off from the cloud kitchen originits business still relies heavily on delivery technology — now including drones.
“If available, we will ship your order with a drone.” That’s how Wolt alerts customers who order from Huuva’s Niittari location in Espoo, which is part of the Helsinki metropolitan area, but Leppälä finds it particularly well-suited to the concept.
While European suburbs aren’t as expansive as those in the United States, people who work, study and live in places like Espoo still don’t have the variety of options they can find in the capital. Huuva allows them to order popular items from partner restaurant brands — and the drones help those orders arrive faster, Leppälä said.
Based on Manna’s completion history more than 50,000 deliveries in Dublin, operations in Finland began quickly once the proper licenses were secured. After a pilot phase since February, the drones have been fully operational for the past two months in Espoo, where they take off from a launch point shared with the delivery-only grocer Wolt Market.
For end users, that means they can order different styles of food from Huuva’s partner brands and throw in some groceries, too—each drone can carry about 4.4 pounds, and Manna can send two of them at once.
This adds another level of comfort as well as speed. Unlike drivers, drones won’t get stuck in traffic at lunchtime. According to Leppälä, this is key to ensuring the food arrives fresh. And it doesn’t hurt if the unit’s financials are more sustainable for Huuva, too.
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Huuva’s team estimates that regular deliveries currently cost €5-6 each (about $6-8), while drone deliveries could drop to €1 ($1.16). This does not account for the additional costs that Manna may incur from setting up its companies in Finland, although the weather was not as difficult as it might have been for a newcomer.
Hailing from Ireland, Manna’s drones have already been thoroughly tested for wind and rain, in such amounts that snow also falls under the same umbrella. Freezing is an additional challenge, but according to head of local operations and maintenance Makar Nalimov, in these cases they will simply use other delivery methods, especially since using chemicals to remove ice is also out of the question when it comes to food.
These alternatives highlight that Manna’s drones are part of a rapidly expanding range of last-mile delivery solutions. Wolt itself already uses sidewalk robots from Cocoa and Spacecraft in Finland, and its parent company DoorDash even built its own, Dot, which started delivering in Arizona earlier this year.
Amidst rumors that it may be DoorDash building its own drone delivery programin addition to working with Alphabet-owned Wing, direct partnerships could be beneficial for companies like Manna and Huuva. The food startup is considering expanding to another Espoo location where Wolt Market would be out of the equation, which would allow the launch to be close enough to the kitchen to make deliveries through a window.
In the current process, Manna’s launch pad is a short distance away. delivery workers on e-scooters pick up orders from the kitchen in a heat bag and then take them to Manna operators. Under the supervision of head of maintenance Nalimov, they place the orders on a scale and balance the weight, if necessary, before placing them in special bags approved by the regulatory authorities.
Durable bags are just one of the many security measures Manna takes to comply with regulations and its own procedures. For example, batteries are routinely exchanged so that drones are always flying with a full charge. According to Nalimov, there is also redundancy at all levels, as well as readiness for different event scenarios — and a parachute as a last resort.
Although Manna has staff on the ground, Mission Control is based in Ireland. There, operators evaluate LiDAR maps, review the planned flight path, and drop a pin to deliver the drone within a short radius of the customer’s location. If the conditions are not met, the order is returned to the courier. If approved, the drone captures an image of the landing spot for final human confirmation before lowering the package by biodegradable rope.
This process has now become routine for Manna’s local staff, who are becoming increasingly busy. According to Nalimov, he and his team are now handling double-digit deliveries per day and are confidently preparing for their first operational winter in Finland. As for Huuva, it’s now ready to double its drone deliveries in Espoo, with one extra wish: to be allowed to put its logo on those regulatory-approved bags.
