Delivery zones and delivery days: how local food businesses set them up

What a zone and a delivery day decide

A zone does three jobs. It tells the customer whether you deliver to them at all. It tells them when — the zone's delivery days and its time window. And it tells you which orders belong on which day's routes, so Tuesday's build only sees Tuesday's zone. Without zones, every order is a candidate every day, and a planner will happily send one van to three corners of the county because those three customers happened to order.

Radius or drawn area?

Most software offers two shapes for a zone, and each fails in a predictable way.

Porch Route offers both: set a radius around a point, or draw the area on the map.

How many delivery days should a zone have?

Fewer than you think. Each extra delivery day divides the same orders into thinner routes while the fixed cost of the drive stays where it was. One day a week per zone is the norm for farms and CSAs; two for a dense urban zone with real volume; daily only for bakeries and meal-prep kitchens whose product doesn't keep. Farm Fresh Northwest assigns each customer's delivery day from their address at checkout, which is the cleanest version of the rule: the area has a day, and the customer joins it.

• Start with one day per zone and add a second only when a single route regularly runs out of shift.
• Stagger zones across the week so packing and loading are spread out.
• Keep the same weekday all season. A customer who knows “my box comes Thursday” needs fewer messages.
• If a zone needs two days, split it into two zones instead — density is the point.

Windows inside the day

A zone's window is the promise to the customers in it — 9 AM to 1 PM, say. Narrow windows please customers and constrain routes; wide ones free the planner. A practical middle: a zone window of three to four hours, and individual windows only for the customers who truly need one — a workplace that closes at 5, a household that can only be home before noon. Porch Route plans stops to arrive inside each order's window and shows you before dispatch which ones the plan can't keep.

Minimums, fees and thresholds

A zone is also where you make delivery worth the drive. Seven Sons publishes free-delivery thresholds of $99 to $175 depending on the delivery area, with a $14.99 fee below them. A threshold does two things: it raises the average order, and it tells a customer in a far zone what the trip actually costs. If your zones differ a lot in distance, set the threshold per zone rather than one number for everyone.

Order cutoffs: the math

The cutoff for a delivery day is the latest moment an order can still be picked, packed and loaded for it. Work backwards: if the Tuesday route leaves at 8 AM and packing takes three hours, the pick list is needed by 5 AM, which in practice means orders close Monday afternoon or evening. Stating the cutoff as hours before the window opens — “24 hours before your delivery window” — keeps it honest across daylight-saving changes and is easy to show at checkout.

Publish the cutoff where customers order, and hold it. Reminders do most of the work — Farm Fresh Northwest sends them 10 and 5 days before delivery — the cutoff itself just has to be the same every week.

Daily caps

A cap is the number of orders a zone can take on one day before the day is full: as many stops as your vehicles can do in the shift, minus a margin for the address that turns out to be up a mountain. Grocers cap delivery slots by store capacity for the same reason. When a day is full, the honest behaviour is to offer the next one, not to take the order and disappoint the customer later. Caps are advisory in the end — two shoppers can take the last slot in the same minute — so the planner still has to cope with a day that is one order over, and Porch Route's limits never stop a route from being built.

What customers should see at checkout

The address decides the zone; the zone decides the days; the days minus the cutoff and the cap decide what's offered. Show only those days. If you take orders through your own store or a farm platform, that logic lives at checkout and the order arrives with its delivery date already chosen — which is why Porch Route never rejects an order that comes in over its API for being outside a zone: your checkout already decided the customer is eligible. Zones in Porch Route apply to orders you add by hand or import from a spreadsheet, which are matched to the zone containing the address.

How zones work in Porch Route today

• Set a radius around a point, or draw the area on the map.
• Give each zone its delivery days (any set of weekdays) and a delivery window.
• Orders added by hand or from a CSV are matched to the zone containing their address; orders from your store's API arrive already decided.
• Routes for a day are built from that day's orders across your vehicles, with each stop's window respected and every stop's temperature matched to a vehicle that can carry it.
• Per-zone order cutoffs, daily caps and a delivery-availability endpoint your checkout can ask are coming.

Common mistakes

• Zones by customer wish rather than by geography. The one member who wants Friday costs a whole extra route.
• Too many delivery days. Each one thins the others.
• A circle across water. Check the far edge against real drive times.
• An unpublished cutoff. If customers don't know it, it doesn't exist.
• A window narrower than the route can keep. Promise four hours and hit it, rather than two and miss.
• Growing without redrawing. New customers on the edge of a zone quietly stretch every route; redraw once a season.