Last-mile route optimization for food distributors

What a delivery day really costs, why planning it is a hard math problem, and what honest, sourced numbers say optimization saves.

What the last mile means for a food distributor

For a parcel company, the last mile is the van that brings a box to your porch. For a food or produce distributor it is the whole delivery day: the trucks that leave your dock at night or before dawn and visit stores, restaurants and kitchens until the last case is off. Route optimization is software that decides which stops go on which truck and in what order, so that day costs as little as it can.

Where the money goes

The best public number for what a truck costs to run comes from the American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI). Its 2026 update put the average at $2.34 a mile in 2025, the highest in the study's history. Driver wages were the largest single line, at about 82 cents a mile.

Source: ATRI, Operational Costs of Trucking, 2026 update (2025 data). ATRI surveys mostly for-hire truckload and LTL fleets, so treat this as a benchmark, not your own cost.

Two lessons follow. First, time costs more than fuel. A route that saves ten minutes of driver time often saves more than one that saves a few miles. Second, the biggest saving is a truck you do not send at all. A whole extra route carries a driver's day, a truck's payment and every mile it runs.

You may have read that the last mile is 30% or even half of all logistics cost. We looked for the source of those numbers and could not confirm them, so we do not use them.

The math problem behind routing

Planning delivery routes is a famous hard problem called the vehicle routing problem. In its simplest form you have one depot, a list of stops and a fleet of trucks, and you want the shortest set of routes that visits every stop once. Real food routes add more rules on top:

Capacity. Each truck holds only so many pallets, so much cube and so much weight.
Time windows. A store that receives from 4 to 8 AM must get its truck in that window.
More than one trip. A truck can come back, reload and go out again. Researchers call this the multi-trip version and note it matters a lot in practice.
Hours of service. The driver's legal day sets a hard limit on how long a route can run.
Store rules. Access limits, equipment needs, stops that must go first or last.

A classic 1997 case from a British biscuit maker had nearly all of these at once: many trips, time windows, two sizes of truck, store access limits, a legal driving limit and unloading times. That is a normal night for a food distributor, not a rare one.

Illustration with invented stops. Routes follow the streets. Grouping stops by area is the first thing an optimizer fixes.

How the software finds good routes

For a day with a few hundred stops, no computer can check every possible plan. Exact methods work only on small problems: one study on Paris road data handled 20 to 80 stops within an hour, and its gap from the best answer grew as the problem got bigger. So real routing tools use heuristics, which are smart shortcuts that find very good plans fast.

The strongest published method right now is called Hybrid Genetic Search. It breeds and improves whole sets of routes, and an open-source version called PyVRP placed first in two major routing contests (DIMACS 2021 and EURO meets NeurIPS 2022). Those wins were on test problems, not on a real dock, but they show the method is sound.

What the driver's day allows

Federal hours-of-service rules for trucks over 10,000 pounds put a hard ceiling on every route. A driver may drive at most 11 hours, may not drive after the 14th hour on duty, and needs a 30-minute break after 8 hours of driving. Unloading time counts toward the 14 hours, which is why stop time matters as much as drive time. Drivers who stay within 150 air miles can use the short-haul exception, but the 11-hour limit still applies.

Source: FMCSA hours-of-service rules, 49 CFR 395. Interstate trucks over 10,000 lb; some state and small-van operations differ.

How much can optimization save?

Honest answer: a solid amount, not a miracle. A 1985 study at Kraft's foodservice business tested a routing system on ten real delivery days of up to 223 stops and found about 11% in possible savings on variable cost. A vendor case study from Martin Brower reports a 6% cut in miles. Neither is recent or independent, and we found no good public study of a small distributor before and after. The safest way to know your number is to test on your own orders.

Moving from manual routing to optimization

Write your rules down. Windows, store limits, truck sizes and the driver's day. If a rule lives only in one planner's head, the software cannot follow it.
Use your real orders. Test on last week's actual nights, not a sample day.
Compare one thing at a time. Trucks first, then driver hours, then miles.
Keep the planner in charge. Good software proposes and explains. The planner can lock a route and change what the software cannot know.

Dock to Route builds routes and loads together from your orders, with your delivery windows, store rules and maximum route hours as rules the plan must obey, and shows each load's miles and cost before the trucks leave.

Sources

Questions people ask

What is last-mile route optimization?

It is software that decides which stops ride on which truck and in what order, so the delivery day uses as few trucks, driver hours and miles as it can while keeping every delivery window and rule.

What does it cost to run a delivery truck?

ATRI put the industry average at $2.34 a mile in 2025, with driver wages the largest single line at about 82 cents a mile. Your own number depends on your fleet, so use this as a benchmark.

How much does route optimization save?

Published food distribution studies show moderate savings, about 6% of miles in one vendor case and about 11% of variable cost in a 1985 Kraft test. The best way to know is to test on your own orders.

Do hours-of-service rules affect route planning?

Yes. A driver may drive at most 11 hours and may not drive after the 14th hour on duty, and unloading counts toward the 14 hours. A route that looks fine on the map can still break the driver's legal day.

Which algorithm do the best routing tools use?

The strongest published method is Hybrid Genetic Search, which the open-source PyVRP library uses. It won major routing contests in 2021 and 2022 on test problems.