ICYMI: Bringing Clarity the Last Mile

Visibility for Food Distributors in 2025

Visibility into your delivery operations as a food distributor might sound simple, but in reality it’s anything but. Gaining clarity into what’s ready to be delivered, what’s been routed, what’s actually been loaded onto trucks, and what’s been delivered—to say nothing of visibility into product that’s already in motion—is a delicate, high-stakes balancing act.

That’s why we focused on it as the subject of our latest webinar: “Bringing Clarity the Last Mile: Visibility for Food Distributors in 2025.” Erik Charles (DispatchTrack’s VP of Marketing) was joined by our friends at Merit Foods, Bailey Buick (Head of Marketing) and Tyler Devaney (Director of Operations), for a chat about the importance of visibility in food distribution and a behind-the-scenes look at how Merit achieves it. 

For anyone who may have missed it, we’ve got a rundown of what we discussed.

Reading a blog post not good enough? Feel to reach out to our team and request the full recording. 

Why Is Visibility Important, and What Does It Mean for Food Distributors?

First things first, Erik gave an account of everything that food distributors need visibility into if they want their deliveries to go smoothly: 

• Routes: You need to be able to see the entire route journey from the distribution center to the hub to the warehouse, including customer time windows, quantities and more.
• Capacity: Are you putting the right orders on the right sized trucks? How are you utilizing different compartments? Are you able to incorporate variables like catchweight into calculations?
• Sites: This mostly comes down to proof of delivery. Do you have photos and videos in addition to signatures to show that you left the delivery in the right place at the right time? Can you access from a centralized location as soon as the delivery is completed?
• Items: Are you leveraging GS1 standards for scanning items on and off trucks? If not, you may be missing an important opportunity to improve traceability—especially when a food recall hits. 
• 3rd Party Deliveries: When you want to work with a contractor to get some of your deliveries done, do you still have the level of tracking and visibility that you need to keep customers happy. 
• Weekly Plans: Daily routes will change reactively based on what orders actually materialize—but it’s also crucial to have easy visibility into weekly route plans as well. This helps you ensure that you’re getting the most out of your capacity week in and week out.

DispatchTrack’s last mile delivery software for food distributors is purpose-built to provide exactly the kind of visibility being described. Merit Foods can attest to many of the ways that our platform helps empower smarter, more efficient food distribution—but more on that in a minute. 

Of the viewers polled during the webinar, about two-thirds said that they had dealt with a recall in the past year. We’re impressed with how lucky the other third have been up to this point. 

This level of visibility is obviously crucial to success in food distribution—and we were happy to find that most of the attendees had already prioritized a high degree of visibility. More than 80% of them said that they had real-time visibility into their deliveries. 

Perhaps as a result, our poll about the top strategies for boosting profitability showed that most (52%) were focused on efficiency, 40% said their top focus was customer experience, and only 8% were focused primarily on visibility.  

How Merit Foods Is Leveraging Visibility (and DispatchTrack) to Delight Their Customers

Merit Foods has been using DispatchTrack since 2023, and in that time they’ve been able to simplify their routing, improve their customer communications, and—yes—boost visibility into their deliveries. 

Bailey noted their biggest priority is serving their local customers and meeting the unique needs of Arizona business (think making sure there’s enough avocados to go around). They pride themselves on being part of the local community and building—but they can’t do any of that without reliable and efficient logistics

High touch, high support is the key to success for dealing with small businesses, and DispatchTrack helps them leverage that model more efficiently across the board. 

Tyler added that although they’re highly localized in their customer base, they do a substantial volume of deliveries: 28-32 trucks leave the warehouse everyday, and every day the routes change. They give their customers a lot of flexibility, which means that not everyone orders every day that they’re on the calendar—as a result, the routes change every day. 

Merit does its best to fulfill the customers needs, even when they’re coming in at the last minute. And with DispatchTrack, they’re able to hit their customers’ preferred time windows 99% of the time. 

Right off the bat, this helped reduce fuel consumption significantly. He also notes that this is a big improvement over life before DispatchTrack, when route management was based solely on tribal knowledge. 

Tyler and Bailey also noted:

• Outstanding support from DispatchTrack
• A “night and day difference” in terms of productivity
• A noticeable payroll impact thanks to a reduction in driver overtime 

Bailey also gave a great rundown of Merit’s upcoming customer appreciation food show Tucson. If you’re interested, you can check it out here: https://meritfoods.net/upcoming-event/11th-annual-customer-appreciation-food-show/ 

Q&A

Following a lively discussion, we also fielded a handful of questions from the audience (thanks to all those who came with questions!). 

• One attendee asked whether DispatchTrack was using AI in its platform. The answer is that the DispatchTrack routing engine has been leveraging AI to improve performance and enhance ETA accuracy for many years now. Erik noted that it’s particularly valuable for exception management situations where making adjustments to an existing route would otherwise risk creating chaos. 
• Another attendee asked about integrating GS1 standards within DispatchTrack. The short answer is that it’s incredibly simple to do—setting it up is the work of a few minutes. You can learn more about DispatchTrack’s support for GS1 standards here: https://www.dispatchtrack.com/company/news/gs1-standards
• Finally, someone asked if they could see a live routing demo. While we weren’t able to do that during the session, you can take a self-guided tour of the DispatchTrack system here: https://www.dispatchtrack.com/thanks-product-tour This includes a short video showing off our route optimization capabilities. 

Of course, if you want a more in-depth look at how DispatchTrack handles route optimization, visibility, and tracking for food distributors, you can always book a demo with one of our experts.