Drone delivery firm piloting Cork service refutes online claim saying its moving operation to US

Drone delivery firm Manna has moved to refute an online report which claimed the Dublin-based company is about to move its operations to the United States.

Founded in 2019, Manna Drone Delivery currently has 180 Irish employees and says it plans to introduce a further 300 jobs here over the coming 18 to 24 months.

It is currently piloting a new – and controversial – Cork city delivery service in Ballintemple and Ballinlough.

Earlier this year, this newspaper reported that while the company intends to expand its operations to Oklahoma “soon”, the company’s founder, Bobby Healy, was quoted as saying his focus was firmly on Ireland.

Mr Healy said that despite the US offering a “significantly more valuable” target territory than the EU, “in terms of natural habitat, I think Europe is probably better”.

He added that while the company’s US licence covered the entire country, in the EU, “local government … is hugely fragmented, and we don’t have that issue at all in the US".

“While I could drop everything and say we’re all-in on the US, and that’s all we’re doing, I have firmly got a green jersey on,” Mr Healy told The Echo  in February.

“I want Ireland to be the number one country in the world for this tech.” Last week, the website DroneXL.co carried an article entitled ‘Manna Air Delivery’s Healy At Xponential: Manufacturing Moving From Dublin To Tulsa’.

The report, written by Haye Kesteloo, the website’s editor-in-chief, quoted Mr Healy as telling the Xponential Detroit symposium that he intended to move “Manna’s manufacturing to Tulsa, Oklahoma, relocating his leadership team next week, and is targeting 2,000 to 3,000 jobs in the city over the next few years”.

“We’re no longer interested in anywhere else except the USA,” Mr Healy was quoted as saying.

“We’re moving our manufacturing there. My leadership team and myself are moving there. We’re heading down next week.” 

When The Echo contacted Manna for a comment, it was referred to a correction published subsequently by DroneXL.co.

That correction read: “After publication, Manna Air Delivery CEO Bobby Healy contacted DroneXL to clarify that Manna is not closing down its Irish operations or manufacturing. Healy acknowledged that his onstage statements at Xponential Detroit could have been clearer on this point.

“The Tulsa expansion announced at the panel is additive to Manna’s existing Irish operations rather than a replacement for them.” 

When contacted, Mr Kesteloo told this newspaper he had recorded Mr Healy’s comments and worked from a transcript. When asked if he would share the recording, Mr Kesteloo said he had deleted it. Asked if he would share the transcript, he did not reply.

Earlier this week, Taoiseach Micheál Martin, whose constituency includes the area in which Manna is piloting its Cork city service, admitted there was a need for greater regulation around the use of drone technology.

Mr Martin acknowledged privacy and noise concerns about drone deliveries in suburban areas, saying there seemed to be “a gap between the aviation authority’s role and that of local authority planning functions”.