Behind the scenes of drone food delivery in Finland

Finland’s weather is notoriously unfriendly; but even so, your food order might 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-party partnership between Irish drone delivery company Manna, DoorDash-owned food delivery platform Wolt, and his own startup, Huuva.

Huuva, whose name means kitchen hood, raised a seed round led by General Catalyst in 2022 with the promise of bringing good food to the suburbs. While it branched out of its cloud kitchen origins, its business still relies heavily on delivery tech — now including drones.

“If available, we’ll send your order with a drone.” That’s how Wolt has been notifying customers ordering from Huuva’s Niittari location in Espoo, which is part of the Helsinki metropolitan area, but which Leppälä sees as particularly well suited for this concept.

Building upon Manna’s track record of completing more than 50,000 deliveries in Dublin, operations in Finland started quickly once the appropriate permits were secured. After a pilot phase from February, the drones have been fully operational for the last two months in Espoo, where they depart from a launchpad that’s shared with delivery-only grocery store Wolt Market.

For the end users, this means that they can order different food styles from Huuva’s partner brands, and add some groceries, too — each drone can carry around 4.4 lb, and Manna can send two of them at once. 

This adds another layer of convenience, but also speed. Unlike drivers, drones won’t get stuck in traffic at lunch time. According to Leppälä, this is key to making sure the food arrives fresh; and it doesn’t hurt if unit economics are more sustainable for Huuva, too. 

Huuva’s team estimates that regular deliveries currently cost €5-6 each (approximately $6-8), while drone deliveries could get down to €1 ($1.16). That’s not accounting for the extra costs that Manna may be incurring from setting up its Finnish operations, although the weather wasn’t as challenging as it might have been for a newcomer.

Coming 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 does present an extra challenge, but according to local operations and maintenance lead Makar Nalimov, in those cases they’ll just use other delivery methods, especially since using chemicals for de-icing is also out of the question when food is involved.

These fallback options highlight that Manna’s drones are part of a fast-expanding range of last-mile delivery solutions. Wolt itself is already using sidewalk robots from Coco and Starship in Finland, and its parent company DoorDash even built its own, Dot, which started performing deliveries in Arizona earlier this year.

Amid rumors that DoorDash may be building its own drone delivery program, in addition to collaborating with Alphabet-owned Wing, direct partnerships could be beneficial to 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 make it possible for the launchpad to be close enough to the kitchen for deliveries to be handed over through a window.

In the current process, Manna’s launchpad sits within a short distance; delivery workers on e-scooters pick up the orders from the kitchen in a heat bag, then carry it over to Manna’s operators. Under maintenance lead Nalimov’s supervision, they put the orders on a scale and balance the weight if needed before placing them into special bags approved by regulators.

Resistant bags are only one of many safety measures that Manna follows to comply with regulations and its own procedures. For instance, batteries are systematically swapped so that drones always fly with a full charge. According to Nalimov, there’s also redundancy at all levels, plus preparedness for different incident scenarios — and a parachute as a last resort.

Although Manna has staff on the ground, Mission Control sits in Ireland. There, operators assess the LiDAR maps, review the planned flight itinerary and drop a pin for the drone to deliver within a short radius of the customer’s location. If conditions aren’t met, the order falls back to a courier. If approved, the drone captures an image of the landing spot for final human confirmation before lowering the package with biodegradable rope. 

This process has now become routine for Manna’s local staff, which is getting busier. According to Nalimov, he and his team are now handling double-digit deliveries a day, and are confidently gearing up for their first operational winter in Finland. As for Huuva, it is now ready to double down on drone deliveries in Espoo, with one extra wish: being allowed to put its logo on those regulator-sanctioned bags.