How To Automate Food Delivery Process With Route Planning & Optimization?

If you run a food business then you know food delivery is one of the key points that drive sales of a food business. It only then makes sense to invest in proper solutions that can help you automate this journey and make it easier and trouble-free. 

Automating the food delivery process is a much-needed next step for your business. The wave of the pandemic brought on a huge change in the mindset of how consumers prefer to enjoy food and the overall experience surrounding ordering food.

In the US alone, 6 out of 10 people prefer to order food online or via online delivery platforms.

These statistics are encouraging for food businesses to up their A-game especially when it comes to ensuring food reaches customers promptly without delays.

Today we are going to explore the impact of automation on your business, how it has proven to be advantageous, food ordering platforms (food delivery management software) to simplify food deliveries for automated food delivery system, and lastly some success stories of businesses that have integrated automation into their workflow.

Why is The Automation of Food Delivery Process Important

Every business, regardless of the industry, must have ample room for scaling. By scaling your business, you create a growing and loyal base of customers by providing them with the highest quality of food. For scaling to happen in a food business, the food delivery platform must be optimized and automated.

If your food business has yet to automate the food delivery process, then it’s time you consider the options. Delivery can be complex for most business owners. But by automating the food delivery system, you are lifting the heavy manual load off yourself and letting the automation handle the complications for you.

Not only will you be able to scale your business like never before, but you will also no longer need to approach consumer delivery as a daunting task but as an integral part of your business

The magic of automating food delivery is that it is a one-time task. Once you have a good system and a delivery strategy in place, there is hardly any upkeep that is required. And the system will complete all the work more efficiently than you ever could.

Advantages of Automating Food Delivery

Before we rest our case, here are some prime advantages of automating your food delivery system –

• Time Constraints in Food Delivery

Food is one of the few commodities that has a very tight delivery time constraint. It needs to be ordered and consumed fresh. When you automate the delivery process, food orders spend way less time on the road and reach the customers fresh.

• Manage Unforeseen Delivery Issues

Numerous situations can delay delivery like traffic, shortage of delivery staff, or an unfortunate accident on the route the delivery driver is taking. If you plan and optimize your routes manually, you can never account for sudden delivery changes. This is where automation can save your day.

• Improve Expenses By Planning Routes Better

Fuel is one of the biggest expenses in a food delivery business. Poorly planned routes for any delivery fleet lead to unnecessary fuel costs. When routes are planned properly, deliveries can get done faster than expected thus saving time delivery drivers need to spend on the road. This also means more deliveries can get done in the same amount of time using efficient delivery vehicles. As a result, it will skyrocket the driver’s productivity and business profits.

• Keep Customers in The Loop

A food business thrives better when it is efficient but also transparent with its customers. All owners of restaurants know that keeping a customer waiting is not the right way to do business. Even more unfortunate is when you lose an appreciative customer base along the way. When you automate delivery, you can let your customers know of any delivery delays. They can even add delivery instructions to the drivers. No more taking chances on delivering food without delays

• Simplify Running The Business

  Countless business operations in the food business are complex. But why complicate delivery when you have the provisions to simplify it? Doing this will also simplify other business operations that you have to oversee as a business owner making your business more streamlined.

How Can You Automate the Food Delivery Process with Route Optimization and Planning Software?

In today’s world, there exists a plethora of technological solutions to solve business owners’ woes. Software solutions today are equipped to solve complex issues that food delivery businesses face like planning routes, optimizing, and more. The traditional approach of mapping routes for customer orders using third-party navigation apps like Google Maps is a cumbersome process. Human errors in these cases are also far too common and unavoidable.

If you rely on such a system, the smart next step is to invest in route planning and optimization software for your food delivery business. As we have seen above, automating the delivery process has advantages that will benefit your business in the long run. One such advanced route optimization software that has been helping many businesses scale is UpperInc. 

UpperInc is a route planning and optimizing software solution that business owners can rely on for their delivery purposes. With UpperInc, you no longer have to worry about planning a route that is the most time-efficient and profitable. 

Some of the top UpperInc features include –

• Streamlined process

By utilizing UpperInc’s features, business owners can save up to 95% of their time that would otherwise be spent on tasks like route planning and importing into Excel and the likes. The overhead of doing this for multiple online orders and multiple drivers is eliminated by UpperInc, saving precious time that you can devote to running a business smoothly.

• Multiple routing optimization

On days that you are swamped with orders, it makes sense to let UpperInc do your route planning. Manually route planning multiple orders is a nightmare for a food business owner because the margin for error is too wide. Avoid misplaced orders or delivery delays by allowing UpperInc to run its sophisticated algorithm by eliminating complications. 

Upper also lets you prioritize orders that have stricter time deadlines, enabling you to have more control over route planning, if necessary.

• More orders fulfilled in the same amount of time

By optimizing routes, UpperInc allows you to fulfill more orders in the same time frame compared to the traditional method. By accommodating more orders delivered in one go, your business scales much faster. Your business will then hit milestones quicker than you could have ever expected.

• Cost savings and Fuel cost-efficiency

The more optimized the route, the faster the order will reach the doorstep of your customer. UpperInc provides the most optimized route that is available. Hence, your delivery drivers will be able to complete the orders quicker meaning lesser fuel consumption during the process. Thereby cutting down on the delivery costs. With UpperInc, you will be able to save up to 40% of delivery costs in fuel. That is a huge amount of money that you can reinvest into other aspects of your business.

• Adjust delivery driver schedules better

Working with a reduced staff number means you need to ensure that your delivery drivers can get to the customers in an optimized time. With UpperInc, you can plan up to 500 stops for 25 drivers at the same time. All with a click of a button. 

Depending on the number of drivers ready for delivery, you can adjust their schedules. This means better communication between you and the delivery personnel.

• Better customer communication

Upper allows you to view the current location of your delivery drivers. This GPS tracking feature means you can notify the customers about their orders in case of any delays. This is a gamechanger for customers as many value transparency and this single-handedly can enable you to convert consumers to loyal customers

• Advanced reporting and analytics on the daily

  With daily and weekly reporting, you can view a detailed analysis of all the deliveries carried out by your delivery drivers. These metrics can boost the morale of the delivery drivers and help improve their overall performance.

  These numbers also will provide you with a roadmap, in case you want to improve this process even more.

Route Planning and Optimization Success Stories

• Wishlist.Delivery

It is one of the California-based food delivery companies. Wishlist.Delivery successfully integrated Upper into their delivery workflow. This small step has simplified their planning process to a more optimized approach that has yielded great results in their business profits.

By switching over from the traditional method of manually planning delivery routes to UpperInc, the owners were able to swap over 3 hours of planning time to save 85% of the same. UpperInc has enabled the Wishlist.Delivery team to increase the overall business profit up to 60%.

In addition to profits, the team at Wishlist.Delivery also improved their delivery times from 20 minutes to just 5 mins.

All of this has led to a monumental surge in the customer satisfaction that the Wishlist.Delivery team has been able to achieve. And all this without the hassle of running a business in a competitive and cutthroat industry.

• Essential Meal Delivery

Essential Meal Delivery is a meal delivery business based in Canada that focuses on delivering food – organic proteins and meats – at affordable prices. Some of the main issues faced by the team were accommodating last-minute order changes, more time spent by delivery drivers on the road and only being able to communicate with customers manually about delivery details.

Once the team implemented UpperInc, incredible changes, for example, 1 hour saved by each driver during delivery, 90% time saved on planning tasks, and more were achieved. With UpperInc, the owners of Essential Meal Delivery are now able to communicate with customers with notifications about order whereabouts.

UpperInc helped streamline the entire delivery process for the team at Essential Meal Delivery and has simplified this step for the entire business.

• Chef Nicole

  This Miami-based meal delivery business implemented UpperInc to solve some of their most worrisome delivery problems. And with this integration, the team saw extraordinary results uncovered in the business.

  For example, the team was able to save 10 hours per week on route planning. In addition to that, the team is now able to accommodate 60% more online food delivery orders, which has allowed them to scale their business. The productivity of routing and planning also went up by 44% and their food deliveries now take 5 minutes and under to re-run routes.

  Notice how by focusing on just the food delivery aspect, businesses like Chef Nicole realize massive opportunities for scaling. This is the power of automation with UpperInc.

Conclusion

It is impossible to overlook the various advantages of implementing automation into your food business. The testimonies of similar food businesses should be proof enough that automation of last-mile delivery, which is already a very complicated and cumbersome process is really how businesses scale in the long run.

When such systems and algorithms are built to save time and improve efficiency, why should you sabotage your own business by not making it a part of your process?

The food business industry is one of the highly competitive industries and the number of food orders received by food businesses is predicted to grow to 21% by 2025. That is a huge incentive to leverage in today’s world.

Consumers are more aware than ever before, so providing a good service (ordering system) is not satisfactory anymore. To win over the hearts of today’s consumers, service has to be exceptional. One way to do that is to ensure the food that reaches the customer is fresh and food delivery is swift.

By automating the food delivery process using delivery route planning software solutions available today, you are setting your business to reach greater heights, thereby staying on top of your competition. One such solution you can try is Upper Route Planner. Go for a 7-day free trial and see how it helps you automate your food delivery process.