Manna Brand Guidelines: The Dublin Drone Delivery Start-Up Founded by Bobby Healy

A Dublin start-up and a village in County Offaly.

Manna is a drone delivery company founded in Dublin in 2018 by Bobby Healy, who remains its CEO. The Irish Times, in a column by Chris Horn in February 2026, described it at its start as a drone-based meal delivery start-up; the company today trades from the domain manna.aero and describes itself as making air delivery an everyday utility. On its about page Healy writes that he founded Manna in Ireland around a simple idea: that everyday delivery should not need a road.

The service is built for suburbs. Horn’s column set out the reasoning: rural distances are long and city centres have few places to drop a parcel, while suburban gardens give a drone somewhere to deliver close to the shopping centres and kitchens that supply the orders. Manna’s aircraft do not land. The company says an order is picked up at a local store, flown to the address and lowered into the yard on a tether, after which the aircraft climbs away.

Its first deliveries came early. The company says commercial deliveries to homes began in a single Irish town in 2019. English Wikipedia’s article on delivery drones records that Manna was ready to start deliveries as the COVID-19 pandemic began in March 2020, and that it switched within about a week from its original food-delivery plan to flying prescription medication and food to residents of the village of Moneygall, after Ireland’s health service, the HSE, designated it an essential service.

Regulation shaped the next stage. Horn wrote that the Irish Aviation Authority was one of the first European regulators to launch a drone licensing scheme under the EU rules that took effect at the end of 2020, and that Manna became the first holder in Ireland of a light UAS operator certificate, or LUC, after detailed scrutiny of its procedures and supervised trials. The company dates that certificate to 2021 and says it was the first granted to an air delivery company in Europe. Within set limits, the certificate lets Manna authorise certain operations itself rather than apply flight by flight.

From Blanchardstown to the delivery apps.

Dublin is where the service grew. The company says it opened in Blanchardstown, its first Dublin suburb, in 2024, with Boojum as a launch partner, and that coffee, groceries and restaurant orders began arriving by air to thousands of homes there. In 2025, it says, it was built into the large ordering apps: Wolt in Finland in January, Just Eat in Dublin in March and Deliveroo in Dublin in June, followed by Uber Eats in February 2026. Customers can now order through those apps or Manna’s own.

The service has also met objections. The Irish Times reported in February 2026 that while some local businesses had been supportive, many residents had objected to Manna’s operations, citing privacy and noise. The paper said Manna had changed its propulsion systems the previous October to reduce noise and says the number of complaints has since fallen. On privacy, the company says its aircraft use a low-resolution camera only to check that the drop zone is clear, and that no images are stored.

Manna designs its own aircraft. It says it builds its own airframe, flight software, ground systems and the tether that lowers each order, and that its current aircraft, Manna 2, is all-electric and was designed for suburban delivery from the start. The Irish Times described Manna’s quadcopters as having eight motors. The company names three areas of its work — the aircraft, the network of hubs and pads, and an operating system it calls Manna OS, which it says plans, flies and tracks every delivery.

Commercial and delivery drones.

Commercial drone makers sell instruments, not toys, and their pictures show it. The aircraft usually appear in the field rather than in a studio: a fixed-wing or vertical take-off airframe, often in white with a bright orange or another high-visibility colour, standing on gravel at a quarry edge, on a farm track or beside a pipeline before launch. The landscape matters as much as the machine, because the product being sold is the map, the model or the measurement that comes back.

Inspection and delivery makers have their own set pieces. Caged inspection drones are photographed inside boiler rooms, tanks, sewers and mines, lit only by their own lamps, with the protective frame as the defining shape. Delivery companies show a parcel being lowered on a line or dropped by a small parachute into a garden, a hospital yard or a field, so that the service, rather than the aircraft, carries the story.

People appear mainly as operators. A typical scene is a field crew in high-visibility clothing holding a tablet or a ground station, planning a flight or checking images on screen, with the drone small in the background. Brochures and websites follow the same order: the industry first, such as surveying, construction, mining, agriculture or public safety, then the workflow, then the hardware, with software screenshots and sample maps placed beside the aircraft.

Much of the industry still meets in person. Trade fairs such as Commercial UAV Expo and XPONENTIAL bring makers, software firms and operators to the same exhibition halls, where stands show airframes on plinths next to large screens of point clouds and orthophotos. In this guide we record what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it and what it says about where its products are made — and mark clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

An Irish start-up looking west to Tulsa.

Manna’s centre of gravity has begun to move to the United States. The company says its first US flights came in 2023, when it delivered Halloween treats to homes in North Texas, and that Coca-Cola HBC invested in it the same month. In July 2026 it opened what it calls its first full-scale US operation, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and it names Dallas and Dubai as the next markets. The company says Tulsa is becoming its US manufacturing and operations hub, and its website now carries the line “Made in USA” in the footer while it continues to fly in Ireland and Finland.

Leadership has widened at the same time. In July 2026 Kenny Jacobs, the former chief marketing officer of Ryanair and former chief executive of daa, the operator of Dublin Airport, joined Manna as executive chair and president, according to English Wikipedia, citing The Irish Times. The company says it operates under approvals from the Irish Aviation Authority, EASA, the US Federal Aviation Administration and the UK Civil Aviation Authority, which it says has granted it a SAIL III operational authorisation.

As a brand, Manna presents itself as a household service rather than an aviation company. Its website speaks in short, light lines — “Time flies,” “Get some air,” “If it fits it flies” — with a three-step explanation of ordering, looking up and collecting the parcel from the garden. Its partner pages are written for restaurants, grocers and pharmacies, and its community pages for neighbours, covering privacy, local jobs and regulation.

For a design guide, Manna shows how a delivery service can make an aircraft feel like an everyday errand. Compare Zipline and Matternet, two other drone delivery companies. For this guide we use a harbour blue, a pale mist and a garden green with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Manna’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.