How Local Bakeries Can Save an Hour Every Morning on Delivery Routes

It's 4:40am. The first racks are out of the oven. Three drivers are due at 5:30, and the wholesale orders for the day are sitting in a mix of texts, a standing-order spreadsheet, and two voicemails from cafes that called after close yesterday.

You pull up a map. You start sorting. The hotel on the east side needs its pastries before the breakfast service at 6:30. The two cafes on Main want delivery before they open at 7. The grocery account doesn't care when, as long as it's before noon. You're holding all of this in your head while the proofing timer goes off behind you.

This is the bakery morning that bakery delivery route software is supposed to fix. Not the baking — the 45 minutes of routing chaos bolted onto the front of it. Let's walk through what that morning looks like when the software does the sorting instead of you.

The real problem isn't the driving. It's the sequencing under time pressure.

Most bakery wholesale routes aren't long. They're tight. A driver might have 12 to 20 stops packed into a few square miles, and almost every stop has an opinion about timing.

• Cafes and coffee shops want product on the shelf before they open, usually somewhere between 6:30 and 7:30.
• Hotels and restaurants need delivery before a specific service.
• Grocery and convenience accounts are flexible but often have a receiving window at the back dock.
• Some accounts are COD — the driver collects a check or cash, and that has to line up with when someone's actually there to hand it over.

Sequencing 15 stops by hand is hard enough. Sequencing 15 stops where eight of them have a "must be there by" time, and getting it right at 4:40am on three hours of sleep, is where mistakes happen. A wrong guess means a driver arrives at a locked cafe, loops back later, and the whole route slides.

What the morning looks like with route software

Here's the workflow RunSheet is built around, start to finish.

Your stops are already in. Most bakery accounts are standing orders — the same cafes, the same hotels, week after week. You set them up once. Each morning you're adjusting quantities and adding the occasional one-off, not retyping the whole list. If an account placed a one-time order, you add it in a few seconds.

You set the windows once, not every day. That cafe that opens at 7 gets a "deliver before 7am" window on its stop, permanently. The optimizer remembers it. You're not re-explaining your route's constraints every single morning.

You hit optimize. RunSheet's VRPTW optimizer takes the full stop list, respects every time window as a hard rule, balances the load across however many drivers you're running, and produces the sequence. This is the part that used to take you 45 minutes. It takes a couple of seconds, and it doesn't send a driver to a cafe that won't be open for another hour.

You assign and dispatch. Split the stops across your three drivers, or let the optimizer split them for you. Each driver gets a link on their phone. No app to download, no account to set up — the kind of driver who started last Tuesday can run a route this morning with zero training.

The driver just drives. They open the link, see their stops in order, tap navigate for turn-by-turn directions, and mark each delivery done. If it's a COD stop, they collect and record it. If you're on the Growth plan, they snap a proof-of-delivery photo at the door that lands in your dashboard with a timestamp and GPS location.

Total dispatcher time: a few minutes instead of the better part of an hour.

Where the hour actually goes

People are skeptical of "save an hour every morning," so let's account for it honestly.

The biggest single saving is the sequencing, because that's the task that's genuinely hard for a human and genuinely easy for a solver. The second biggest is the one people forget to count: the mid-route phone calls. When every driver has their full route on their phone, the calls to dispatch asking what's next basically stop. For a one-person operation where the dispatcher is also the baker, that quiet is worth a lot.

The COD and time-window details bakeries actually hit

A quick word on the parts that trip up cheaper tools. A lot of basic route planners let you label a stop as time-sensitive but then ignore the label when they build the route. RunSheet treats time windows as constraints the optimizer has to satisfy, not notes it displays after the fact. A cafe with a "before 7am" window won't get scheduled at 7:45 because the math wouldn't allow it.

Same with COD. If a stop can only be visited in a specific window because that's when someone's there to pay, that window is enforced. You're not finding out at 9am that your driver hit the COD account during the 20 minutes nobody was at the register.

Proof of delivery, for the disputes you don't see coming

Wholesale bakery accounts dispute deliveries more than you'd think. "We never got the croissants." "The order was short." On the Growth plan, every stop can carry a timestamped photo of what was dropped and where, with an AI-written caption describing it. When a cafe manager swears the delivery never came, you pull up the record, see the photo of the boxes on their back counter at 6:42am, and the conversation ends.

What it costs against what it saves

The Starter plan is $49/mo and covers up to 3 drivers and 100 routes — enough for a small wholesale bakery running daily. If you deliver more than once a day or run a bigger fleet, the Growth plan at $149/mo adds proof-of-delivery photos, driver performance analytics, and a Shopify integration that turns online orders into stops automatically.

Set that against an hour of your time every morning, plus the fuel burned on backtracking routes, plus the occasional refunded order you can now prove was delivered. For most bakeries the tool pays for itself before the end of the first week.