Food delivery route planner for bakeries, caterers and school meals

Routes that start before dawn

A wholesale bakery often loads the van at 5 am, so that cafés have bread and pastries before they open. Four route settings cover that:

Start time

Any time of day, for example 05:30. Every stop's arrival time is counted from it.

Start — depot

Your bakery or kitchen: the van loads here.

Round trip

The route ends back at the depot, and the drive back counts in the route's time, so you know when the van is free again.

Minutes per stop

Parking, carrying in the trays, getting a signature. A single stop can have its own time, such as 15 minutes for a hotel kitchen.

Add the day's customers

Upload the order sheet as a CSV or Excel file, paste a list or type an address. Columns such as Name, Phone, Notes and Delivery window are picked up automatically. A route can have up to 200 stops; see Create a route and add stops.

Two lines for the same address, say bread and cakes for one café? Turn on Group parcels: they make one stop, and the time at the stop counts once.

Optimize — one route per van

Click Optimize Route. The stops get the best order along real roads, around each customer's delivery window, and every stop gets an arrival time; one that would miss its window is marked late in red. See Optimize with delivery windows.

More than one van? On the packages for 10 and 15 team members, Route Planner Teams splits the day’s customers between your vans automatically: load all the stops, click Split into routes and choose how many routes you need — each van gets a balanced route from the kitchen, in the best order. On the 3 driver package you decide who takes which part of town — by postcode or ZIP code, or by your usual routes — and make one route per van.

The same route every day: duplicate and adjust

Most food delivery routes barely change: the same cafés every weekday, the same schools all term. Route Planner Teams doesn't have recurring routes that repeat on a schedule by themselves. Instead, you duplicate yesterday's route:

• In Routes, open the route's menu (⋮) and choose Duplicate route.
• The copy keeps the stops in the same order, the depot, start time, round trip, minutes per stop, delivery windows, phone numbers and notes for the driver. The same driver is picked for you.
• Choose the date and click Continue. The arrival times are already worked out: the route is ready to send.

Then adjust it: remove the café that's closed this week, add a new customer, and optimize again if the stops changed. Routes can be planned up to 7 days ahead, so on Friday you can lay out Monday's routes.

Plans change after the van has left, too: you can still add, remove, reorder and edit the stops the driver hasn't reached, and the changes go to their phone at once. See Assign a driver and follow the day.

Delivery windows for schools, canteens and cafés

School meals — school lunches in the US — come with a slot: the kitchen wants the hot boxes between 11:00 and 11:45, not at 10:15 and not at 12:30. A café wants its order before it opens, a canteen before the lunch rush. Give each stop a delivery window, from a Delivery window column of your file or in the stop's details (one window per stop).

Notes for the driver carry what they need at that door: “Kitchen — rear entrance, ring the bell”, a gate code, “3 nut-free meals, labelled”. Notes are plain text: Route Planner Teams doesn't track allergens or what's in each box.

Keep the order the schools agreed

Sometimes the order is fixed: the nursery that eats first gets its meals first, whatever the map says. Turn on Keep my order in the route settings and click Calculate route. The stops follow your list, and the arrival times are still calculated along real roads, so you see at once if a school would be late. To change the order, drag a stop by its number.

To make sure the order holds on the road, turn on View only for that driver on the Team page. A view-only driver can't add, remove or reorder stops or optimize again, but still navigates to each stop in Google Maps, Waze or Apple Maps, marks stops and captures proof of delivery — right for a relief driver who doesn't know the route. See Dispatchers and view-only drivers.

A signature on the delivery note

Schools, care homes and wholesale customers often sign for what they receive. On the Team page, choose what drivers capture when a stop is Delivered — for example a Photo and a Signature — and when it's Not delivered, such as a photo and a note. The driver can't mark the stop until it's done.

The person at the kitchen door signs on the driver's phone. Still using a paper delivery note (a delivery receipt in the US)? The driver can photograph it, signed. Each proof is saved with the time and the place where the phone was.

Signatures at the schools but only a photo at the cafés? Make a photo the team default and choose Custom proof on the schools' stops, or add a Signature required column to your file. See Proof of delivery and parcel control and Proof of delivery app for drivers.

On the website, every proof is in the route's Proofs. To check deliveries against your invoices, export a route or the whole day to Excel, CSV or a printable PDF route sheet, with each stop's status, the time it was marked and which proof was collected. Photos and signatures are kept for 60 days after the route's last change.

When the café is closed: failed deliveries

Shutters still down, nobody at the school gate, the porter gone home. The driver marks the stop Not delivered with a photo and the reason, and it appears in the route's Activity with the time and how far from the address it was marked.

You see it on the website as soon as it's marked (with no signal, it syncs later). Call the customer and add the stop to a later route or to tomorrow's.

Two things Route Planner Teams doesn't do. It doesn't send texts, emails or tracking links to your customers — on the website you see each route's progress and updated arrival times, so you can tell a school when the van will arrive. And it doesn't log van temperatures or food safety checks such as HACCP records: keep those as you do today.

What it costs

Everything in this article — round trips, delivery windows, duplicate routes, view-only drivers and signed proof of delivery — is included in every Teams plan, from $99 a month (£99 in the UK).

Frequently asked questions