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Mr Healy declined to say where in the UK but said it would involve between 10 and 15 aircraft, carrying out 500 to 1,000 deliveries a day between them.
He said: “The UK is probably our most important market in the continent of Europe, both in terms of cultural alignment but also the scale of the market. The UK does over 900m food delivery takeaways and deliveries a year.”
Britain was previously viewed as an attractive destination for drone operators, with Amazon choosing a site near Cambridge to conduct its first tests almost a decade ago.
However, the company never launched commercial operations, instead moving testing to the US before making its first deliveries this year.
The CAA has recently made progress towards allowing autonomous drones, adopting a similar safety standard to the EU and granting limited licences. Manna received a licence for a limited test at a technology festival earlier this year.
However, Mr Healy said the regulator was only currently granting drone licences in areas where there were no other aircraft, limiting the potential in Britain’s congested airspace.
Manna has made more than 160,000 drone deliveries in Ireland from locations including Tesco and Subway, with only one incident in which a drone deployed its parachute.
Orders are made via the app and loaded onto a drone at the store. A drone then hovers over the destination, lowering the cargo from the air.
The company says most orders are delivered in under three minutes and that the drones make less noise than cars while taking traffic off the road.
Manna, which manufactures its drones in Wales, has raised around $30m (£25m) from investors, including British venture capital fund Molten Ventures and Patrick and John Collison, the Irish brothers behind the payment giant Stripe.
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