Sunday is Mother’s Day, and it’s one of the biggest days of the year for eating out, as loving sons and daughters treat Mom to lunch, dinner or – more typically – brunch. It’s just one example of an occasion when temporary spikes in demand showcase the need for food suppliers to respond nimbly and efficiently to market fluctuations.
The Mother’s Day surge in demand for restaurant food transport is spectacular. Online booking service OpenTable reports a typical 200% increase in seated covers on Mother’s Day compared to a typical Sunday. Party size increases too, up from an average of 3.38 to 3.99 — a rise of 18%. Recently, there’s been an accompanying spike of as much as 50% in brunch reservations on the Saturday before Mother’s Day, as savvy folks try to avoid the crush.
And, while the date itself is predictable, the actual demand is not. OpenTable found that, in 2015, only 5% of bookings had been made a month prior to the holiday; one week out, it was 36%. A significant chunk of reservations (18%) were booked on Mother’s Day itself.
Add in an overall shift in the food service industry towards more fresh, not frozen, ingredients, and that means a much greater demand for expedited delivery of fresh ingredients. On Mother’s Day, fresh is King. Or, more properly, Queen.
Getting fresh produce where it needs to go, rapidly and at the right temperature, is one of the biggest challenges faced by food transport companies. In many ways, the move to fresh ingredients has meant more frequent, smaller deliveries, which adds complexity, as well as pressure to do more with your existing fleet. And, when there’s an upswing in demand for events like Mother’s Day, order volumes increase, adding extra complexity for the transportation router.
Routing and scheduling software allows transportation planners to be totally on their game. It not only allows food transport operations to flex with greater efficiency to meet the temporary surge without letting costs sky-rocket, it also enables better planning because of the access to detailed, accurate volumes from prior years.
Here are a few reasons why automating your planning process will help you manage peaks in demand:
Delivery routing software maximizes the number of drops a single truck can make and minimizes the miles driven, time taken and fuel expended to make deliveries. It also keeps a close eye on complicating factors such as hours of service (HoS) restrictions for individual drivers, so you get the most out of each shift, too.
Manual planning relies on the human brain to take account of a dizzying number of factors. Special events such as Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas present a huge rise in routing complexity that is often impossible for one person, or even a team of people, to handle manually while keeping costs under control.
Temporary surges in demand, and the changes in food transport operations that come with them, often result in scheduling chaos, late and missed deliveries. With optimized route plans, your delivery schedule becomes more reliable than when you plan manually, on the fly. With route optimization, you can give more accurate ETAs to customers, and they can rely on you showing up.
When delivery locations are restaurants and corner stores (don’t forget a nice bouquet of flowers for Mom), there is often a need for staff to stop what they’re doing in order to supervise a delivery. Giving a truly accurate time of arrival minimizes the time they are called away from other, core duties, such as food preparation or operating the till.
Routing and scheduling automatically also takes a lot less time than doing it manually, which means you can push back order cut-off times, crucial in better serving restaurants trying to cope with those last-minute reservations.
With routing and scheduling software, you can formulate far more accurate plans for meeting the spike in demand, because you will have extensive data on volume changes from prior years. With manual planning, you might only be able to access information about the fluctuation in orders, while routing and scheduling software will allow you to accurately translate the uplift in order volumes into the effect on deliveries. That means you can better plan ahead how you will flex to meet the increased demand.
With routing and scheduling software taking a lot of the headaches out of delivering fresh ingredients to over-stretched restaurants, operations responsible for food transport can be confident they won’t have to disappoint restaurants and hotels under pressure to offer something fresh and delicious to eat from Saturday evening service through to Sunday lunch.
Find out how our customers use Paragon’s routing and scheduling software to meet demand here.
