Finland’s weather is notoriously unfriendly; but still, your food order could be delivered by a drone.
On a rainy day after Helsinki’s annual Slush conference, Finnish 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, Huuva.
Huuva, whose name means hood, raised a seed round led by General Catalyst in 2022 with the promise of bringing good food to the suburbs. Although it branched out from its cloud kitchen origins, its business still relies heavily on delivery technology — now including drones.
“If available, we will ship your order with a drone.” That’s how Wolt has notified customers who order from Huuva’s Niittari location in Espoo, which is part of the Helsinki metropolitan area but which Leppälä sees as particularly suited to this concept.
Although European suburbs are not as sprawling as those in the US, people who work, study and live in places like Espoo still lack the many options they can find in the capital. Huuva lets them order popular items from partner restaurant brands — and drones help those orders come faster, Leppälä said.
Building on Manna’s track record of completing more than 50,000 deliveries in Dublin, operations in Finland started quickly once the relevant permits were secured. After a pilot phase from February, the drones have been fully operational for the past two months in Espoo, departing from a launch pad shared with delivery-only grocer Wolt Market.
For end users, this means they can order different styles of food from Huuva’s partner brands and add some groceries as well – each drone can carry around 4.4lb and Manna can send two of them at once.
This adds another layer of convenience, but also speed. Unlike drivers, drones won’t be stuck in lunchtime traffic. According to Leppälä, this is the key to ensuring that the food arrives fresh; and it doesn’t hurt if the unit economy is also more sustainable for Huuva.
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Huuva’s team estimates that regular deliveries currently cost €5-6 per pcs (about $6-8), while drone deliveries can come down to €1 ($1.16). That does not take into account the additional costs that Manna may incur in setting up its Finnish operations, even if the weather was not as challenging as it might have been for a newcomer.
From Ireland, Manna’s drones were already thoroughly tested for wind and rain, in such quantities that snow also falls under the same umbrella. Icing is an additional challenge, but according to local operations and maintenance manager Makar Nalimov, in those cases they will simply use other delivery methods, especially since using chemicals for deicing is also out of the question when food is involved.
These fallback capabilities highlight that Manna’s drones are part of a rapidly growing range of last-mile delivery solutions. Wolt itself already uses sidewalk robots from Coco and Starship in Finland, and its parent company DoorDash even built its own, Dot, which began making deliveries in Arizona earlier this year.
Amid rumors that DoorDash may be building its own drone delivery program, direct partnerships beyond working with Alphabet-owned Wing could be beneficial for companies like Manna and Huuva. The food startup is considering an expansion to another Espoo location, where Wolt Market would be out of the equation, which would allow the launch pad to be close enough to the kitchen for deliveries to be made through a window.
In the current process, Manna’s launch pad is within a short distance; delivery workers on e-scooters collect the orders from the kitchen in a warming bag, then transport them to Manna’s operators. Under the supervision of maintenance manager Nalimov, they placed the orders on a scale and balanced the scales if necessary before placing them in special bags approved by regulators.
Resistant bags are just one of many security measures that Manna follows to comply with regulations and own procedures. For example, batteries are systematically changed so that drones always fly with a full charge. According to Nalimov, there is also redundancy at all levels, plus preparedness for various incident scenarios – and a parachute as a last resort.
Although Manna has staff on the ground, Mission Control is based in Ireland. There, the operators assess the LiDAR maps, review the planned flight itinerary and set a pin for the drone to deliver within a short radius of the customer’s location. If the conditions are not met, the order falls back to a courier. If approved, the drone takes a picture of the landing site for final human confirmation before lowering the package with biodegradable rope.
This process has now become routine for Manna’s local staff, who are getting busier. According to Nalimov, he and his team are now handling double-digit deliveries per day and are confidently ready for their first operational winter in Finland. As for Huuva, it is now set to double down on drone deliveries in Espoo, with an added wish: to be allowed to put its logo on the regulator-sanctioned bags.