Bobby Healy, the CEO & Founder of Manna Drone Delivery, breaks down how they are making commercial drone delivery a reality.

Cheddar Innovates

Making Commercial Drone Delivery a Reality

Welcome back to cheddar innovates brought to you by curiosity stream. Now when you hear delivery you usually envision food delivery, truck delivery drivers, all those type of things. But there's a new age of delivery coming and it's coming from the sky. Our next guest is using custom developed aerospace great drones to deliver good straight to your home and joining us now with more on that is bobby Healy Ceo and founder of manna drone delivery. Thank you so much for joining us today, bobby pleasure to be here. So this sounds so cool and so futuristic to me. But you know, tell us a little bit more about you guys making these commercial drones to deliver. Uh, and I guess you're just really making a reality in our everyday lives. So how is manner using these operations and offerings right now? Yeah, well we're we're serving about 46,000 customers now in Dublin Ireland, the capital of Ireland very densely populated area and you can open our app and you can get everything delivered to your house by air in about three minutes time. Our average delivery is two minutes 40 seconds. You can order grocery, pharmacy, coffee, you name it all sorts of baked goods, takeaway goods, pretty much everything that's available for sale in the community. You can order and have arrived in your front or back alone in about three minutes. Wow, that's pretty amazing because still here in the US we're doing test markets in certain areas. How heavy can these groceries because if my wife is ordering you may not be able to carry it. But how heavy that's the cool part. So you can order one aircraft will take about £8 of cargo and pretty large. So your typical single basket in a convenience store. But if you order more than that we just fly multiple aircraft in formation to your house and we can deliver you know £16 with two aircraft or £24 with three. Oh that's so cool. So how do you partner with local businesses to offer this drone delivery service? Simple one. Once we roll out to a town and we fly off we'll find a roof in the middle of the town to fly from. They can either be on the roof with us. So if they're hot food vendor with many of those are actually on the roof preparing the food as the orders come in and then we fly it or with our new aircraft. We actually fly from a centralized base out to the vendor. We picked the product up from them and then we fly to the customer. So we work with everybody in a town that wants to work with us And so far that's 100% of the vendors in the town. One drone delivery and it seems like it's definitely a more environmentally friendly option for delivery. Right? The drones are more private, they're quieter, they're safer and they're completely green they produce absolutely no C. 02 when they make a delivery. So what are some of the more surprising perks of drone delivery? I think the big one is speed and you know when you can order as we have frequently somebody ordering an onion one onion by drone delivery and that's someone that really needs an onion badly you know. But instantly the big big surprises behavior people you know just use it for everything and the other surprises. The number one thing that people order for delivery now is coffee hot coffee really? And is it still hot when it arrives piping hot and a little foam design that you get on top is also perfectly intact. Never never drops built. Now do you have to go to the people's homes first to make sure that they're safe. Like there's a lot of trees or wires or anything like that. How do you know it's okay to fly there? We do that automatically when the aircraft flies out to the you get to drop a pin where you want us to deliver the product commune your driveway or your back lawn. When the aircraft flies out of checks using radar and lidar, so small lasers underneath the aircraft to verify that there's a flat safe area to deliver on the aircraft doesn't land on the ground. That winches it down from about 60ft altitude? Okay I got you and I love that you can have it delivered to your backyard so you can stand your pajamas and still get your coffee and keep your day moving now. I know a lot of people out there may be wondering about price. What are we talking about? A price range for a delivery, like a coffee or an onion for someone who really needs? Yeah. Well it's it's funny different stores so we let the stores set their own prices for delivery. So for example our milk manner as we call it. So you get a leader of milk or a gallon of milk delivered, they only charge a dollar 50 for that delivery. Whereas our supermarket yeah supermarket charges $5. But as time goes by and we see people using the service more and more frequently we would expect to see the price come down and certainly it will be a lot cheaper than using role-based delivery and by the way you don't tip the drone. Right. Amen to that. But you know what we need you here, I know your services widely used to people in Ireland but are there any plans on scaling this up to an even larger market? 100%. We plan to be in the United States at the end of this year. Too early next year and we actually see the United States as the number one market in the world for drone delivery. Once we get going. OK so what do you see the future looking like for this industry? It seems like it's just booming. We are seeing drones do more and more every day. Well, that picture you have there is is deliveries to very densely populated town of 35,000 people. And in the town that we serve now, 38% of the homes use drone delivery regularly. Each dot there is at home using drone delivery at least once a month. So the future is very bright for drone delivery and the whole world can expect to get it in 3-5 years ubiquitously. Well, I mean do you see that there's gonna be traffic lights in the sky? I mean it seems so futuristic like I see a lot of congestion happening in the sky. How are they gonna manage all those drones, control all of them. That's actually one of the easier problems to solve. There's a lot more space in the sky than there is on the ground on the roads and to coordinate digital devices or robots in real time is actually not a difficult problem to solve. So, no, the skies won't be congested. We don't need many drones to to manage a population of 50,000 people. And so actually congestion won't be an issue at all. And it's actually already solved through various standards. All right, well then in that case, what's in store for the future for man? A drone delivery for man. And we're going to continue our rollout across europe. So we have three or four european countries slated for next year and as we grow And of course the United States at the end of this year, early next year, and we expect to be the largest drone delivery business in the world in 3 to 5 years. Wow, I'm sure you're definitely going to do it. So congratulations in advance and good luck with flying those drones, bobby Healy Ceo and founder of Manna drone delivery.