Delivering groceries is all about logistics. Planning, routing, and scheduling are key, whether you’re getting fresh produce from the farm or dry goods from a warehouse to your customer’s door. It would help if you got these logistics right to deliver groceries successfully and efficiently.
We’ve looked into how to help grocery services everywhere do this. We know how to cut mileage and costs to increase profits. We'll share knowledge to help make routing simpler to improve delivery times, and how to personalize the customer experience without needing a big support team.
Here's what you'll find in the article:
Starting a grocery delivery business is like any food delivery service. You need a solid business plan, the right tools and team, and good processes to grow your business with 100% operational visibility and efficiency.
To start your own grocery delivery business, you’ll need to:
Check out our guide on starting a food delivery business for detailed info on succeeding at each step. You'll find tips on forming a business plan, buying the right equipment, hiring the perfect team, and more.
Once your grocery delivery business is running, focus on optimizing. The smoother your workflows and processes, the quicker and easier it will be to expand to new areas, open more stores, and handle more orders.
Optimization is about refining operations or tasks to reach specific goals. For food delivery businesses, this means improving logistics to boost profits. It's all about the steps you need to take to increase revenue and profitability, whether you're just starting out or already established.
Optimization means:
Optimization is crucial for growing a business. It helps you find growth opportunities and cut unnecessary costs. This is especially important for small or local businesses with tight budgets. Even small changes can make a big difference. For instance, optimizing delivery routes to be the shortest and cheapest saves money on gas, reduces vehicle wear and tear, and lets you handle more deliveries.
For example, when a fresh food distributor optimizes their last-mile delivery routing, planning, and scheduling, they can expect to reduce their fleet's mileage and cut driver costs significantly. By using optimization software, businesses can increase their delivery capacity and improve their on-time delivery rate from 89% to 94%.
You should keep optimizing because delivery businesses deal with lots of variables.
Order volumes and product demands change. Just four years ago, in-store grocery shopping was the norm. In April this year, online grocery sales totaled $8.5 billion. That is around 4% more than April last year. The surge in grocery delivery demand started with COVID-19, but many people plan to keep using it because it's so convenient.
Planning and scheduling needs shift too. Employees take vacations, demand goes up and down, and vehicles need maintenance. So, you can’t stick to the same schedule every week or even every month.
Customer expectations for delivery have changed, too. With new technology, over half of consumers now expect real-time tracking for their orders. Services like Instacart and Shipt have made next-day delivery obsolete by offering same-day delivery, sometimes in as little as one hour.
When you add these variables to changing traffic patterns, weather issues, and daily unpredictability, it's clear that optimization isn't something you can just set and forget. Business owners need to build it into their business model from day one and keep improving it over time to stay profitable.
Luckily, there's a tool you can use to streamline your grocery delivery business effortlessly. eLogii is a powerful route optimization software that plans the most efficient last-mile delivery routes tailored to your company's requirements. With eLogii, you can enhance driver schedules, provide customers with real-time tracking, and expand your field service operations efficiently.
Here’s how:
When tasks are assigned to a team, you can optimize and plan routes specifically for that team. Users can optimize routes for a single day or for many days at once.
Both drivers and tasks display the team they belong to. You can filter tasks and drivers based on specific teams or those without any team assigned.
When creating a new user role, assigning them to a team is crucial, especially if their role limits their access to view or edit only certain team-related entities. Admins and managers, however, have access to all teams.
During team-based optimization, the system automatically filters tasks and drivers belonging to the selected team(s) for optimization. Tasks from excluded teams remain unassigned during this process.
With these options, businesses can streamline operations by ensuring tasks are efficiently allocated to designated teams, optimizing productivity and enhancing workflow management.
The Route Optimization feature in eLogii allows users to customize driver routing to better align with their business requirements. These adjustments can be configured under each driver's profile settings.
Users have the flexibility to set various limitations, including:
These features are part of the Advanced eLogii engine, except for the maximum number of stops per route, which is available across all versions. Tailoring these settings helps businesses optimize efficiency and tailor their delivery operations to meet specific needs and challenges effectively.
Time windows in eLogii are an optional feature, meaning you can import tasks without specifying the time range for completion. However, when used, time windows act as constraints. If the engine can't schedule a task within its specified time window for an available driver, the task will be marked as unviable.
There are two types of time windows you can set in eLogii:
You can specify both pickup and delivery times or just one of them, depending on your needs. This flexibility allows you to fine-tune your scheduling and ensure timely pickups and deliveries, enhancing your overall delivery efficiency.
Quick Time Window Adjustments
Need to extend or completely change time windows for some tasks? No problem! You can easily do this in bulk. Just select the tasks you want to adjust, go to the Actions menu under Resolve, and choose Extend Time Windows. Adjust the time window to your liking and hit Save. It's a simple way to keep your schedule flexible and efficient.
You can easily set up customer notifications in the Configuration menu under Notifications.
Customize the content for each update your customers receive and choose whether to send it via SMS or email. Notifications can be tailored for delivery contacts, pickup contacts, and depot contacts.
You can also decide which notifications your customers receive. For instance, if you don’t need to inform them that the driver has arrived at the depot to pick up their package, just disable the Task Pickup Arrived notification. This way, you can keep your customers informed without overwhelming them with unnecessary updates.
Single-Day Route Data Processing
At the end of each day, all routes for that day are processed, regardless of whether the tasks are completed. This means that even a route with unfinished tasks will still be included in the daily processing.
Multiday Route Data Processing
For multiday routes, processing happens at the end of each day for routes that start on that specific day. For instance, if a route starts on Monday and ends on Wednesday, it will appear in analytics on Monday, showing a duration of three days. This helps you track and analyze routes efficiently over multiple days.
eLogii’s pricing is tailored to fit your specific operational needs. Share some details about your distribution or field service business, and we’ll give you an accurate pricing estimate.