Coffee from the sky: inside Manna's drone delivery service in Dublin 15
In parts of Dublin, takeaway deliveries no longer arrive by car. They come from above.
From a launch pad at Blanchardstown Shopping Centre, Irish company Manna Air Delivery has been flying small autonomous drones over the suburb since February 2024, dropping coffees, groceries and take-away orders into gardens and driveways. For residents in the catchment area, it's gone from novelty to routine. For the rest of Ireland, and for visitors hearing about it for the first time, it still sounds like science fiction.
Manna's operation in Dublin 15 has already completed more than 52,000 deliveries, part of over 200,000 flights worldwide since the company was founded. The service has removed thousands of local road journeys in Blanchardstown alone, replacing short van and car trips with battery-powered flights.
What is the Manna's drone delivery service?
At its simplest, Manna is a local delivery service that swaps vans and scooters for small aircraft. Customers order through the Manna app, choosing from 49 partner businesses in and around Blanchardstown Shopping Centre. That list includes independent Irish grocers, bookshops, clothing stores and a butcher alongside a number of national brands.
Once the order is confirmed, staff at Manna's base pack it into a standardised cargo box. A drone is loaded, lifted to the launch point and sent on its way. The aircraft flies at up to 80 km/h, typically within a 3 km radius of the centre, though some routes stretch to 6 km.
Most deliveries take five to six minutes from loading to drop-off. When the drone reaches the delivery point, it hovers, lowers the box on a tether, releases it gently, and returns to base for the next job.
For the customer, the experience is simple: order, track the aircraft on the app, collect the parcel from the lawn or driveway. The complexity lies elsewhere.
How it works behind the scenes?
Manna's aircraft are fully autonomous, but they don't operate alone. Every flight is supervised from the company's operations hub in Glasnevin, where trained staff monitor multiple missions on large screens.
Each drone follows a pre-approved flight path designed to avoid obstacles and respect agreed corridors with the Irish Aviation Authority (IAA). Onboard sensors and navigation systems manage altitude, speed and route, while ground staff can intervene if needed.
Power comes from rechargeable batteries which are swapped between flights and charged using renewable electricity. According to an independent emissions study, Manna's drones are up to eight times more efficient in CO? terms than a petrol car doing the same delivery. The company estimates that in each suburb it operates, the service cuts local emissions by around 150 tonnes a year.
Safety?
Manna's safety case is built on redundancy. Each aircraft has dual motors, backup communications and automatic return-to-base protocols. If something unexpected happens - a sudden change in wind, or a technical fault - the drone is designed to take the safest possible action without waiting for human input.
The operation in Dublin 15 runs at roughly 140 flights per day, serving a population of about 120,000 people. Every one of those flights is logged.
"We're running a delivery service, not a tech experiment"
Eoghan Huston, Manna's Chief Operating Officer, detailed that his emphasis was less on the drones themselves and more on the discipline needed to run them at scale.
"The technology does most of the work," he said, "but what makes it real is the operational discipline. We treat every flight like an airline flight - logged, checked, verified."
Each mission is authorised by a safety supervisor before take-off. After landing, data from the flight are reviewed and fed back into the system to improve performance and reliability.
"People assume we just press 'go' and the drone flies off," Huston added. "In reality, it's a carefully controlled environment with layers o...
