How One Small Farm Scaled Deliveries To 1,000 A Month

Many of our customers find Routific when their businesses are taking off, and managing deliveries is becoming a problem. There are a few reasons for this:

• Planning efficient delivery routes is not easy.  With 10 destinations, there can be more than 300,000 roundtrip permutations and combinations. Increase that to just  15 destinations, and the number of possible routes could exceed 87 billion! Of course most of those routes are obviously inefficient and a human would never consider them, but even so, with every new stop added to a route it gets more difficult to plan.
• As a result, manual route planning can take hours every day—which means late dispatching, or a key team member wasting time which could be better spent elsewhere.
• The costs of last mile delivery are notoriously high,  because packages are delivered one by one, so there are no economies of scale from bulk transportation. Inefficient routing might also mean a business has to hire more drivers and buy more vehicles that it really needs. 
• As a business scales, it gets more and more difficult to offer a great customer experience that includes accurate delivery time estimates and timely, personalized notifications. These small interactions can make all the difference between a customer who feels valued and one who feels taken for granted.

These all add up to a big headache for a growing business—so anything that can  improve delivery efficiency, save time, and bring costs down will help to keep things on track.  

More efficiency, no loss of customer closeness

That's exactly the problem we're trying to solve at Routific, so we're always delighted to hear when it's working—like in this video featuring Brie Casadei of Terra Firma Farm Creamery in Connecticut. Brie talks about how using Routific's route optimization and delivery management software has helped her to:

• Reduce her fuel costs by 35%
• Increase deliveries from 80 per month to nearly 1,000 a month
• Maintain a sense of community and closeness with her customers‍

Brie makes some really good points about the business value of automated customer notifications. As her business grew and she started sending out drivers instead of making deliveries herself, she no longer had daily personal contact with her customers, but:

"With Routific they still get a text from me that's saying 'Hey, we dropped your order'... There are days when one driver is delivering like 60 deliveries. That's 60 customers I still want to talk to, I still want to say 'hey, thanks for your order"... The communication through Routific has saved us so much time."

The video is a shortened version of a half-hour presentation called  "Connecting with Community & Growing a Farm Brand" that Brie delivered at the 2021 Direct Farm Conference hosted by our partners Barn2Door.  She's a great storyteller and has lots to say about running a small farm business, expanding product lines, using social media to connect and more. If you're building a farm-based business we can recommend watching!