What's the Best Food Delivery Software for Distributors?

If you look at the food delivery software page on Capterra, you get quite an odd mix. Many of the options, like Hunger Rush and Toast, are POS systems with capabilities for managing deliveries from storefronts to diners. Others, like Routific, are last mile delivery routing solutions that could theoretically be used to generate delivery routes across a variety of food-related use cases.

But there’s nothing that jumps out as being obviously designed with the unique needs of food distributors in mind. After all, there’s a huge difference between getting a pizza to an apartment complex while it’s still hot and getting a week’s worth of canned tomatoes from the distribution center to the pizzeria.

So where are the software solutions for this latter use case? How can distributors find the best software for getting the right pallets to the right customers at the right time? We’ll cover those questions in depth over the course of this post. 

What Is Food Delivery Software?

Food delivery software means different things to different people. For some, the key pain point that this software should address is taking in food delivery orders—these businesses can work out the delivery details from there as needed. 

For others, it’s about actually dispatching and routing delivery drivers to customers’ homes. But for food wholesalers and distributors, the key pain point is around managing recurring deliveries in an efficient way. This means generating repeatable delivery routes that can be altered as needed based on daily order volumes and mixes. 

So, for food distributors, food delivery software is all about managing complex routes and powering the execution of those route plans—this means leveraging not just sophisticated route optimization algorithms, but also dispatching, tracking, and customer communication capabilities to ensure that your food deliveries are executed in a cost-efficient way. 

In other words, the best food delivery software covers the entire last mile logistics journey from end to end. 

Must-Haves for Your Food Delivery Management Software

If your food delivery needs are more complex than the average pizza parlor, it’s important to find delivery management software with the right capabilities. That means looking for something that can directly address each of these areas:

Strategic Route Planning

Every week will bring a mix of new and recurring orders, and it’s critical to balance the flexibility to take on new orders with the stability that your recurring customers demand. Your fleet can’t run entirely new routes every week—but they can’t run the same routes either. 

This is where a strong strategic planning process comes into play. By taking all of your distribution routes and optimizing them by frequency and days of the week, you can create the foundational plan you need to get the most out of your fleet. When you have an optimized plan that’s built for flexible reroutes and directly integrated with your daily routing process, you can ensure that you’re positioned to utilize your assets efficiently each day of the week no matter what orders get thrown your way. 

End-to-End Visibility

Effective fleet management depends on having visibility into fleet capacity, your asset locations, your delivery statuses, etc. 

Here’s what that means in practice:

• Visibility across roles and functions: Sales personnel should be able to access order statuses and ETAs for their orders through their own app. Customer support should have fleet data at their fingertips for resolving issues, etc. 
• Visibility in context: Make sure you have a way to visualize not just locations but statuses and live ETA projections. 
• Predictive visibility: What would happen if you added a new stop to a given route? What about a new route from a new DC? What if you onboarded a new customer? Real fleet visibility means being able to predict the answers to these questions.

What-If Scenarios

What-if scenarios are essentially test environments in which you can simulate what would happen if you made certain adjustments to a given plan. You more or less need SaaS technology and AI-powered routing to make these practicable, but they can be invaluable for utilizing your fleet in the smartest and most cost-effective way possible. 

Customer Experience

Your customers are at the heart of everything you do when it comes to food delivery and distribution. Your food delivery management software needs to reflect that fact by empowering you to give customers the level of visibility they need from end to end. For most businesses, this will mean sending notifications that keep customers in the loop about when to expect their orders to arrive, offering live delivery tracking, and enabling two-way messaging in real time. 

Of course, another crucial aspect of customer delivery experience in food is meeting delivery expectations. This requires more than just wraparound communications—it also requires you to keep your delivery promises by delivering at the right time. Smarter, more integrated route optimization for easier rerouting is an absolute must in that department. 

How the Right Software Reduces Last Mile Delivery Costs

When your food delivery software tackles the entire delivery planning, routing, and execution journey from end to end, you can simplify your last mile and reduce your delivery costs. 

Here are just a few of the ways you can do that with the right food distribution technology:

• Reduced person-hours spent on routing: Instead of taking months to create a new set of static delivery routes, you can let the software update things in a matter of minutes and make small adjustments as needed. The sheer time savings from this can have a huge impact on a distributorship. 
• Fewer miles driven per stop: There are two ways the right software helps you achieve a reduction in fuel usage and driver hours: First, by providing you accurate visibility into what your cost-per-stop, cost-per-case, and cost-per-route actually are. Second, by giving you the tools to improve route density without causing chaos for your customers. 
• Reduced missed and failed deliveries: When your driver isn’t able to make it to the delivery site at the right time, you risk impacting customer loyalty—but you also risk having to make a costly redelivery attempt (essentially doubling your initial delivery costs). By ensuring that you have route plans that are built to execute, you can deliver at the right time more consistently. 
• Improved driver retention: Driver pay is already a huge driver of costs—and that problem is only exacerbated when you can’t retain your drivers in the long term. The right software sets them up for success, which in turn reduces churn. 
• Improved customer retention: It’s always more expensive to acquire a customer than to retain an existing one. When you choose food delivery software that’s built around the customer experience, you’re investing in keeping the customers you already have. 

How DispatchTrack Empowers Smarter Food Distribution and Reduced Costs

When it comes to choosing the best food delivery software, top brands around the globe rely on DispatchTrack. 

<< Learn how Quirch foods reduced routing time by 50% with DispatchTrack >>

<< See how Wismettac leverages DispatchTrack to get more out of their delivery capacity >>

DispatchTrack is a multi-tenant SaaS solution that is purpose built to provide last mile delivery management capabilities that moves at the speed of the foodservice sector. We offer the features flexibility that industry professionals need to meet the needs of their stakeholders and customers.

We do this with best-in-class capabilities, including:

• Route planning and optimization
• Delivery execution
• Customer experience and engagement
• Delivery tracking and visibility 
• Driver management
• Digital proof of delivery
• Easy integration and setup

The result is that users can manage the entire end to end last mile journey for foodservice distribution and execute their roles in an easy, efficient, and cost effective way.

Request a demo with one of our food distribution experts today to learn more!