Delivery route optimization for a food business's day

Routes start with a point on the map for each drop. pickup.kitchen places addresses for you as orders arrive and when you add a delivery by hand. Two stops at the same door are kept together, so a driver drops both on one visit.

A few addresses will not match, like a new building or a typo. They wait in a list called Needs a pin. Tap Fix the address, pick the right suggestion or drop the pin yourself, and the stop joins the plan.

With more than one driver, the first question is who takes what. You choose how the day is split.

• Auto: drops are sorted by direction around your kitchen and cut into one wedge per driver, with about the same number of stops each.
• By city: give each city a driver. Useful when you serve three towns and each driver knows theirs.
• Draw a zone: sketch an area on the map with a pen or by clicking corners, name it, and give it a default driver.

For each driver, pickup.kitchen reads the driving times between every pair of stops. It starts at your kitchen, heads to the nearest stop, and then keeps swapping stretches of the route while a swap shortens the drive.

That is a standard method, and it works well for a day's run of a few dozen stops. The map then draws each route in its own colour, with the kilometres and the pay estimate beside it.

If you know something the map does not, change a route's driver or remove a stop, then optimize again.

Your Optimize button is the draft. It orders stops by straight-line distance and estimates the drive from that. It is instant and free, so you can press it all day while orders still come in.

When a driver taps Start deliveries, the order is worked out again with real road times, once. The Plan page says which one you are looking at: “Draft order (straight-line). The driver's app sets the road order when they start.”

After you are happy, Send to driver is the final step. The driver gets a notification, and the board shows if you change the route afterwards.

A late order, a cancelled stop, or a stop added by hand changes the plan. The page tells you: “Drops changed since this was ordered. Optimize again.”

Assign & optimize gives the drops that are on no route to one driver, in driving order from your kitchen. Routes already planned keep their drops. Plan again reshuffles routes that have not started.

Routes a driver has started are locked. That is deliberate, so a stop the driver is walking to does not move. You can still remove a stop, hand the route to another driver, or reopen a finished stop.

Drivers who go home after the last delivery can add their address under Finish at, then tap Optimize my route. The stops are ordered so the route ends near home. If the order is already best, the app says so.

Pay counts the kilometres from the kitchen to the last delivery. The drive home is not paid, so choosing a finish point does not cost the driver anything.

Once a route is moving, arrival times for later stops come from where the driver is now and the time left on each leg. Guests see a window, such as “between 4:30 and 5:15 p.m.”, that narrows as the driver gets closer. They are not given a single minute that traffic will break.

A stop moved to the end of the route is estimated again, instead of showing the old time.

Before you tap Optimize, set where routes start and clear the Needs a pin list. Choose how to split the day: auto, by city, or by zone. Check that each driver is on the right route, then optimize.

Read the kilometre and pay estimates. If one route is far longer than the others, move some stops to another driver and optimize again.

This planner does not handle delivery time windows per stop, or vehicle capacity, such as a van that holds 12 trays. It plans one open route per driver, from your kitchen to the last stop, unless the driver sets a finish point.

For a food business with a few dozen drops a day, that covers the real problem: a clean split and a sensible order.