How Food Delivery Management Software Skyrocket Your Meal-Delivery Business

With the rising number of people choosing a healthier lifestyle, the meal delivery business is growing. If you own a food business then you may know delivery is a crucial component of your business. 

Without a delivery strategy, businesses fall out of service due to scalability issues. If you are not accepting online ordering or customer-preferred delivery options, then it is you may fail to convert direct consumers to loyal ones.

In recent years, food delivery management software has emerged as a gamechanger for delivery service providers. Thus, the last-mile delivery solution makes the life of food business owners uncomplicated and efficient. 

In this article, we are going to deep dive to understand food delivery management software.

What is Food Delivery Management?

Food delivery as a service has come a long way since its conception in 1995. The workflow includes activities like managing orders, delivery route planning, and route optimization for delivery. Many food businesses utilize the incredible power of delivery services to boost sales and scale their businesses. Introducing delivery into your business(if you haven’t already) is an incredibly crucial step to reaching consumers that you may otherwise have not been able to serve. 

Food delivery management is essential to building a loyal customer base. But with an increase in demand comes the pressure to provide high-quality food delivery operations and if not done right, it can affect the quality of your business. 

Food delivery management solutions help to ease this pressure. Although delivery management started as a manual and cumbersome process, these days an increasing number of business owners are switching to more efficient solutions. These solutions also help to get the job done in just a fraction of the time.

Who is it useful for?

As mentioned earlier, manual delivery management is a highly cumbersome process. Surprisingly, many business owners still depend on traditional delivery methods. Many still prefer this approach due to a plethora of reasons such as inexperience with third-party delivery systems/software solutions, fearing large logistics costs, or set up time.

Unknowingly, they are hurting their own business. As the food industry is exploding with competition left and right, the only way to stay at the top and reap the benefits is to implement delivery management software solutions into your business workflow. 

Whether you are a small business or subcontract food delivery service to a bigger company, it is important to make your daily or weekly processes such as scheduling routes as efficient as possible.

Top 6 Food Delivery Management Software

Here are some widely used food delivery management software you must consider for your business. 

1. Upper Route Planner

Upper is the robust route planning and optimization software that helps food delivery businesses to expand their service.  It uses advanced algorithms to find the best routes which mean you can schedule your deliveries and hand over the meal on time. You can track the driver’s exact location during the delivery process. 

A route planner allows you to set priority levels, driver’s preferences, and delivery instructions for the assigned route plan. Besides, customers also receive real-time updates regarding their food parcel delivery. It directs the delivery agents to the fastest routes so that your buyer receives the hot-served meal at their doorstep. Upper’s fully automated process assists you to achieve the maximum number of online food deliveries

2. RouteXL 

RouteXL is another food delivery management software equipped that can churn out the best routes for your delivery agents. The cloud-based software offers features like auto task distribution, routing alerts, route optimization, and a GPS tracker. It reduces the workload of the dispatch manager and helps the driver to reach multiple locations in a jiff. 

Moreover, you can schedule your online meal-kit orders and it will auto assign the route to the available drivers. This process will reduce your paperwork and save more time. Powered by  OpenStreetMap, this delivery management software is capable of finding cost-effective routes. 

3. Tookan

It provides route optimization services for food delivery business owners to increase their delivery efficiencies. It allows real-time tracking so that the admin user can check the driver’s location. It also sends automated notifications to the customers regarding the ETA of their food parcel. 

The delivery management software includes intuitive dashboards, a delivery app, a live tracker, analytics & reports as its core features. It helps large-size delivery businesses to streamline their daily operations and improve delivery performance. As a result, it can help you achieve your desired business profit. 

4. Onfleet

It is a widely popular delivery management tool to manage food delivery orders. It provides the best routes for delivery agents to reach the location and hand over the food parcel. Plus, it has a driver tracking feature for its users that can connect the driver and dispatcher throughout the delivery process. 

Onfleet is an advanced route planning software that distributes the tasks among the delivery drivers and directs them with effective routes. It makes the delivery process easier and simpler so that your driver spends minimum time on the road and hands over the parcel as quickly as possible. 

5. DispatchTrack

It is the food delivery management software suitable for all types of restaurant or online food delivery business owners. DispatchTrack is a user-friendly software that offers optimal routes to perform food deliveries in a short time. With DispatchTrack, drivers find it easier to locate the destination and deliver the hot meal. 

A delivery management software enables route optimization for its users. They can share the route plan with the drivers once the parcel is ready to dispatch from the warehouse. Also, it sends timely customer alerts so that buyers can make themselves available to receive the package. 

6. Shipsy

Shipsy is a delivery management software for business owners to organize delivery operations hassle-free. It simplifies the driver’s job by providing the best routes. The software comes with advanced features to perform multi-stop delivery. It makes sure your drivers don’t get stuck in the traffic areas and quickly deliver the food to the buyer. 

Besides driver’s assistance, it also takes care of online customers by sending push notifications. This helps you increase customer experience and retention rate as well. Hence, you don’t need manual intervention while planning routes for food delivery.

Benefits of Food Delivery Management

Food delivery management comes with a long list of benefits that can uplevel your delivery operations. When you implement such an intricate system into your business, you are essentially changing the way you offer online customer support options. 

Automating the delivery lifecycle of your business can reap the following benefits:

• Lesser fuel consumption and business expenses
• High conversion of loyal customers
• Effortlessly track orders in real-time
• Less struggle route planning thus saving time
• Reduced delivery delays due to unforeseen events

What are the Challenges of Meal-Delivery Business?

Besides the growing competition faced by the food businesses, owners deal with multiple challenges ranging from food quality to delivery costs. 

Let’s take a closer look at the challenges before we discover ways to solve them.

• Ensuring the freshness of food

  Being a food business owner, ensuring delivery of online food ordering is a must. No matter how good of a business workflow you have got, if you cannot ensure that the same quality of food is served in-house and for delivery, then you will be left with dissatisfied customers and bad user reviews.

  The delivery process must be seamless so that food reaches consumers in the highest possible state of quality.

• Large expenses due to poor route planning

  When you plan delivery routes manually, the degree of human error is large. This means the delivery drivers may not always be on the most optimized or shortest route. This causes a lot of unnecessary road time which directly leads to needless fuel consumption and therefore large delivery expenses.

• Unexpected delivery delays

  You can never anticipate how a day will go when you run a food business. Some obstacles are unavoidable but delivery delays are very much a solvable issue. Delivery delays can happen due to plenty of issues like the absence of delivery drivers on time, traffic, accidents, road blockages, and more.

• Difficulties in tracking orders and transparency

  In case a delivery is delayed, it is in your best interest to keep customers updated about it. Imagine waiting for your food order but not having any idea about the ETA. Never leave customers hanging for too long lest they lose interest and trust.

• Multiple order complexities

  In a fully-fledged food business, it is common that a single delivery person runs multiple delivery orders at one go. Trying to map the best delivery course that the driver must take can be an overwhelming process for a business owner.

Food Delivery Management Software – A Solution to Known Challenges

When we look into a solution to eradicate long-term obstacles in the meal-kit business, food delivery platforms stand out on top. Delivery software like Upper is built specifically to solve the pain points that business owners face daily in their delivery service or third-party services.

It can be your personal restaurant delivery software that is equipped with the capabilities of the top food delivery software tools and thus offers an unprecedented restaurant management system experience. 

Upper helps you extend a robust food delivery system, streamlines the process of delivery, and optimizes the routes taken by the delivery drivers. Delivery management systems work best for food business owners as they are required to deliver to multiple customers daily. 

One of the advantages of working with a food delivery software such as Upper is that you can completely automate your workflow. when you rely on a food service delivery software like Upper, it makes things simpler for your team.

How Upper Turned the Tables for Meal-kit Business Owners?

1. Essential Meal Delivery

   David Greensmith, Founder of Essential Meal Delivery says that food delivery software has helped to completely streamline the delivery process in his business.

   This meal-delivery service that mainly operates in Canada serves customers with meals focusing on organic meats and organic proteins. Before working with Upper, David and his team delivered around 400 meals every week by manually routing and adding customer addresses. One of the biggest challenges faced by the food delivery company was not being able to locate individual drivers in real-time or knowing the real-time status of an order.

   After upgrading to Upper, the all-in-one food delivery team management software, David’s team is now able to save up to 90% in planning time alone. After 100% automating the delivery workflow. By keeping the customers informed using notifications about delivery status, the team can fully scale the business to new heights.

2. Wishlist.Delivery

   Yet another business success story is the one from Wishlist.Delivery. This California-based business delivers a variety of meal kits, local food, and frozen food products. According to the Founder at Wishlist.Delivery, Phred Swain-Sugarman, switching to Upper has simplified all their scheduling processes making the business more profitable.

   Before investing in Upper, the team at Wishlist.Delivery used to rely on a lot of guesswork in planning efficient routes. The team also relied on Google Maps and spent up to 3 hours daily just planning routes that would avoid traffic. The team’s challenges also included managing multiple drivers running multiple delivery orders.

   With Upper, the route optimization food delivery software platform, the team at Wishlist.Delivery was able to cut down their planning time by 85%. This is monumental for the business as they were also able to increase their customer satisfaction to 70% and business profits to 60%.

Need a Hand in Expanding Your Meal-kit Delivery Service? Try Upper

Upper can make help you deliver the parcel once you receive the order confirmation. It finds the best routes so that your delivery agent doesn’t take too long and the customer will receive a hot meal quickly. From dispatching the food to delivering it to the buyer, Upper takes care of the entire process with its array of advanced features. Let’s take a look at its main features. 

• Route Planning and Optimizing
  Route planning with Upper helps you save up to 10 hours every week. You can also reduce redundancy by archiving regularly accessed routes. This saves even more time.
  You can also prioritize certain order stops. This essentially means the algorithm will optimize the route keeping the priority orders in mind and offering a strict delivery time window to the delivery personnel.
• Excel import
  Upper is a functional delivery management software that will work its magic after you import your Excel with all the order stops. With this efficient food delivery management platform, you can add up to 500 stops for a single route plan. This alone skyrockets the planning phase of delivery, saving precious time that you can otherwise invest in improving different areas of your business.
• Single-click Dispatch
  As a business owner, you can keep the manual process of delivery to a minimum because Upper enables a dispatch dashboard for its users with just a click of a button. Big points for convenience.
  You can dispatch drivers with just a custom messaging service, and reassign drivers in case of driver’s unavailability. 
• Reports and analytics
  Good feedback helps you in business growth and nothing can beat the impact of numbers in a business. With Upper, you will be able to generate daily and weekly reports, analyze the performance of delivery drivers and make improvements in your business to scale even faster.
  Analytics is a powerful tool in scaling a business and Upper helps you leverage this feature to improve the performance of each process in the delivery lifecycle.
• Proof of delivery
  For all orders, your delivery drivers will be able to provide proof of delivery by collecting signatures or photos of delivered orders.
  Introducing more accountability into the delivery process motivates all employees in the team to deliver orders keeping customers’ best interests in mind. 

Being a meal-kit business owner, you need to adopt an advanced tool to cope with the challenges and improve delivery efficiency. By doing so, you deliver the highest quality service and make existing customers into loyal ones. Whether you manage an independent restaurant business or you run a meal-kit delivery business, all you need is the right software. Hence, you can leave things up to reliable delivery management software.