Food and Beverage Route Planning FAQ

For too long, food and beverage route planning has been a process that relied on knowledge that’s trapped in the heads of planners, domain experts, and consultants. The logic behind the construction of any given route or plan might be based on information about customer preferences, driver habits, and traffic patterns that simply vanish the moment your lead dispatcher takes a vacation. And that’s before we even talk about the knowledge that goes into actually creating route plans using whatever software solution you happen to have in place—often, in-house planners need to rely on outside experts to actually get workable routes out of the software they’ve licensed.

Obviously, this isn’t an ideal scenario for anyone—at least not anyone whose goal is to keep their food and beverage customers happy with timely, efficient deliveries across their networks. That’s why we’ve made it our mission to answer some of the most important questions about food and beverage route planning and provide distributors with the tools they need to boost efficiency and ensure stellar customer service.

Are there alternatives to static food and beverage route planning that are more efficient without causing disruption?

Some of the most frequent questions we hear all revolve around route optimization. While industries like retail and building supplies have been able to leverage dynamic route optimization to improve efficiency and maximize capacity utilization for years now, the general feeling has been that a dynamic approach to routing doesn’t work in industries like food distribution where you make recurring stops to the same customers every week. This leaves a lot of businesses feeling like they don’t have any options for boosting daily route efficiency without wreaking havoc on their existing routes.

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