Wholesale Food Distribution Fleets

If there’s one thing modern consumers seem increasingly willing to pay for it’s convenience. Until recently, the rapid adaptation, enormous popularity, and subsequent influence of e-commerce over the last two decades has largely skipped industries containing the majority of wholesale food distribution customers: for example, foodservice and grocery. However, that is changing – and fast.

In 2017 when Amazon bought Whole Foods, it helped trigger an industry transformation for grocers. Big food retailers like Walmart, Kroger, and Target began to pour money into improvements such as expanding online delivery and in-store pickup and consumers responded positively in kind. The COVID-19 pandemic only accelerated this trend.

So, what does this mean for wholesale food distribution fleets? Well, if e-commerce is here to stay, so are the demands passed along with it to distributor fleets, including:

• Meeting increased demand on time to avoid wasting perishable products
• Reducing delivery times to meet customer expectations
• Committing to critical delivery windows to preserve freshness
• Streamlining the routing process to maximize truck capacity and easily manage last-minute requests
• Improving customer experience by providing better visibility to their order