How to plan delivery routes for a farm or CSA

Why farm routes are different from courier routes

A courier's day is dense: hundreds of stops a few streets apart, the same city every day, drivers who do nothing else. A farm's delivery day is the opposite. Local Food Marketplace's account of setting up home delivery with its farms describes 30 to 50 stops a day spread across a wide area and full eight-hour driver days, and Barn2Door reports farms in its program making 40 or more deliveries a day — often on one or two days a week, with drivers who also pack, milk or sell at the market.

Three things follow. First, the order of stops matters more, because the miles between them are long and a bad sequence costs an hour, not five minutes. Second, temperature is a constraint rather than a note: a frozen quarter of beef cannot ride on the produce van. Third, the people driving change with the season, so whatever you hand them has to work on the first try, with no training.

Step 1: choose delivery days by area, not by customer

The biggest single lever is to deliver to each part of your territory on a set day. Farm Fresh Northwest, a farm home-delivery service, assigns each customer's delivery day from their address at checkout — the customer doesn't pick a day, the map does. That keeps every route dense: Tuesday is the north county, Thursday is the city, and a member who moves house changes day, not driver.

• Draw two to five delivery zones that follow roads and rivers rather than a circle on a map, and give each zone one delivery day a week to start.
• Stagger the zones across the week so packing is spread out, and keep the same weekday all season — customers plan their week around it.
• Make the delivery day visible at checkout, so the order arrives already knowing which route it belongs to.
• Revisit the map after a season: a zone that regularly runs past the driver's shift is two zones.

The full trade-offs — radius versus drawn area, how many days a zone should have, minimums and caps — are in delivery zones and delivery days.

Step 2: set an order cutoff you can pack to

An order cutoff is the moment after which an order goes on next week's route instead of this one. Set it from the back of the day: when do the vans leave, how long does packing take, when do you need the pick list, and how long before that must the last order be in? Farm Fresh Northwest publishes its rhythm — reminder emails 10 and 5 days before delivery, the card charged a couple of days before, edits allowed until 3 days before. You don't need a schedule that generous, but you do need one that is written down and the same every week.

Two cutoffs are common: an ordering cutoff (the customer's deadline) and a routing cutoff (when you build the routes). Leave a gap between them for the late phone orders, the cancellations and the address that has to be checked.

Step 3: collect addresses you can actually drive to

Rural addresses are the quiet killer of a delivery day. A route planner places each address on the map; when the address is vague — a road name with no number, a new subdivision, a farm gate a quarter of a mile from the mailbox — the pin lands in the wrong place and the driver loses twenty minutes. Reviewers of even the best-rated route planners still list wrong pins, and having to clean up addresses before optimising, among their top complaints.

• Ask for the whole address at checkout, including the unit or lot, and a separate line for delivery instructions: “cooler on the north porch, gate code 4417”. Those words go on the driver's screen.
• Keep the coordinates once a driver has found a hard place, so next week's plan starts from the right pin.
• If your store already holds coordinates, send them with the order; the planner can skip the lookup.
• Check the flagged addresses before you build routes, not after the van has left.

In Porch Route, addresses are found on OpenStreetMap at no cost. An address that can't be placed is flagged for the office to look at rather than dropped or guessed, and an order that arrives with coordinates skips the lookup entirely.

Step 4: decide what each vehicle can carry

Write down, per vehicle: which temperatures it can hold (frozen, refrigerated, dry), how much weight it can take, how many stops one driver can do in a shift, and what a mile costs you in fuel. USDA's guidance for food shipped to consumers is that perishables should arrive frozen, partly frozen, or at 40°F or below — so “refrigerated” means the vehicle or the packaging holds that for the whole route, not that the box started cold.

This is where a planner earns its keep. Porch Route treats each vehicle's temperature capability as a hard rule: a frozen order will not be put on a van that can't hold it, even if that saves miles. A stop that no vehicle can carry is left unassigned with the reason in words, so you know before loading rather than at the customer's door. Weight is enforced only where it's known — an order nobody weighed is flagged, never counted as zero.

Step 5: build the routes the same way every week

With zones, a cutoff, clean addresses and honest vehicles in place, building routes is the easy part: pick the day and the vehicles, and the planner produces a route per vehicle with stops in order and an estimated arrival at each. Look at three things before you accept it: any unassigned stops and their reasons; whether the windows customers chose are met; and what the plan saves against driving the orders in the order they came in. Porch Route shows miles, drive time and fuel against exactly that baseline, so the number is one you can check.

Then apply what you know. Lock the customer who has to be first. Drag the two stops on the same lane together. Move a stop to the other van because that driver knows the gate. A locked stop never moves when you re-optimise, and the same orders and vehicles always produce the same plan, so nobody is surprised at the morning briefing.

Step 6: give drivers the route, not the spreadsheet

Seasonal and part-time drivers will not install another app or make another account. In Porch Route, dispatching a route texts or emails the driver a link that opens drive mode in the phone's browser: one stop at a time, in big type, with a button to hand off to Google Maps or Apple Maps, and Delivered, Couldn't deliver or Skip with quick reasons. Photos and signatures are taken at the door. When the phone loses signal on a county road, updates wait in a queue and sync when it reconnects.

Staff drivers who drive every week can log in instead and see their routes for the day. Either way, the office sees each driver's position and progress on the dispatch board while the route runs. The choice between a link and an app is covered in driver apps vs texted route links.

Step 7: tell customers, then tell your store

Farm customers want two things from a message: when to expect the box, and what to do about the cooler. Dutch Meadows Farm asks its customers to leave a cooler with ice packs out; Farm Fresh Northwest texts the night before to say “set out a cooler”; Seven Sons tells customers that frozen boxes left at the door should be unpacked promptly. The updates Porch Route sends — scheduled, on the way, almost there, delivered, couldn't deliver — go out by text or email under your farm's name, each with a tracking page that shows the truck on its way and the proof photo when the box lands. The delivered notice waits a few minutes, so a driver's mis-tap can be undone before anyone hears about it.

If your orders live in a farm platform or a store, the same outcome goes back there over a signed webhook, keyed by your own order number, so nobody updates order statuses by hand on Tuesday night.

What farms publish about their own delivery programs