Route Optimization for Food Banks & Food Distribution Networks

You’re running lean operations teams across two or more programs simultaneously — grocery rescue pickups, home delivery, senior services — with paper-based reporting, no real-time driver visibility, and a dispatcher texting routes at 3:30 in the afternoon. Every missed pickup is a missed meal. Every hour your team spends on manual data entry is an hour not spent on mission.

Wise Systems is a last-mile routing and dispatch platform built for food bank and food distribution fleets that need to do more with less.

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Solve these common challenges with Wise Systems

See how the Wise Systems delivery automation platform can help you overcome your greatest challenges and help you make more on time deliveries

Manual route building and spreadsheet-based dispatch eat hours your team doesn’t have

No real-time visibility into driver locations — missed pickups surface a day or two later, if at all

Grocery rescue reporting is a full-time job: extracting stop-level data field by field, store by store, driver by driver

Inbound complaint calls from retail partners and delivery recipients pile up because there’s no proactive communication

Next-day routes aren’t ready until mid-afternoon — call-outs in the morning blow up carefully built plans with no fast way to recover

Two programs (or more) running on separate systems, or no system at all

Automate route planning and streamline delivery execution with powerful, easy-to-use applications that accelerate your fleet’s performance. Give dispatchers visibility and insight with the Dispatcher web application. Give drivers an intuitive delivery driver app that enables end-to-end navigation and coordination with merchandisers, or share key information with the mobile app your drivers already use.

Increase customer satisfaction with real-time insight into deliveries, and automated notifications that reflect your brand voice.

Simplify data sharing between your systems of record with seamless API integrations.

Who runs food bank fleets?

Wise Systems works with food banks, food rescue networks, and community food distribution operations of all sizes:

Feeding America network members running regional grocery rescue and home delivery programs, accountable for detailed Feeding America reporting
Independent food banks managing multi-program fleets with lean operations teams and limited technology infrastructure
Community food distribution organizations delivering to seniors, homebound residents, and neighborhood pantries
Food rescue intermediaries coordinating pickups across retail partners like Kroger, Publix, and Walmart
Hybrid operations running both inbound rescue (pickups from donors) and outbound delivery (to recipients) on the same fleet, same day

How Second Harvest Cut Fuel Costs by 20%

Second Harvest is one of a growing number of food banks using Wise Systems to optimize routes, reduce costs, and serve more people with the same resources. Learn how Second Harvest Food Bank reduced fuel use by 20%, cut delivery times by two hours, and reclaimed 40 hours of staff time per week with Wise Systems route optimization by reading the case study.

Download the case study

Enable the best process for planning, reviewing and managing daily routes

The Wise Systems delivery automation platform works seamlessly with your suite of applications to enable an end-to-end process that empowers your teams.

Use automation and simplified visualizations to plan the most efficient daily routes for your entire fleet in one instance.
Send routes to drivers instantly.
Let drivers tweak routes manually or quickly accept automated adjustments.
Say yes to last-minute orders with automated, optimal-driver suggestions or selections.
Give managers the information they need to manage exceptions in real time, including historical and live driver tracking.
Deliver better customer experiences with ETAs and real-time insight into delivery status.

With Wise Systems, food banks can:

Maximize vehicle utilization
Decrease time spent planning daily routes
Reduce dwell times for drivers
Scale up to meet increasing demand
Manage driver availability
Quickly onboard teams with easy-to-use user interfaces
Easily handle pickups and deliveries
Make decisions more quickly with algorithms that work alongside the fleet
Enable more informed fleet management with machine learning that improves over time

Automated route planning for retail distribution - Wise Systems

Plan smarter. Dispatch with confidence.

Food bank operations are not simple delivery routes. You’re managing pickups and deliveries in the same day, tracking poundage by store and department, handling call-outs that cascade into missed stops, and submitting monthly data to Feeding America. Wise Systems gives your operations team the tools to handle all of it — without building it from scratch every morning.

Build optimized daily routes for all drivers across all programs in one place with Route Planner — consolidate what used to take half a day into minutes
Model visit frequencies and program territories across your service area with Strategic Planner, so the baseline structure of your routes reflects actual geography and pickup patterns
See every active driver on one screen, redistribute stops in real time when a driver calls out, and recover pickups before the window closes with Dispatcher
Auto-capture arrivals and departures at every stop — no manual driver input, no gaps in the data

Explore Strategic Planner Explore Route Planner Explore Dispatcher

Give your retail distribution drivers the tools they need

Food bank drivers aren’t just making deliveries — they’re collecting poundage data, logging pickup reasons, capturing signatures, and documenting conditions in real time. That data has accountability and reporting value.

With the Driver app, your drivers can:

Log department-level weights at grocery rescue stops using configurable forms built for your workflow — bakery, frozen, produce, dry goods captured with a tap
Select reason codes when a pickup can’t be completed (dock full, store closed, no donation available) — one step, no paper
Capture signatures and photo documentation at home delivery stops, eliminating the hunt for lost paperwork
Receive route updates in real time when stops are added, reassigned, or resequenced mid-day

Best of all? o more texting drivers with last-minute route changes. New stops are automatically added and threaded into their routes, and notifications delivered.

Explore Driver

Wise Systems driver mobile app for retail distribution.

Retail distributors improve the customer experience with Customer Portal from Wise Systems.

Elevate your brand with superior recipient experiences

Giving your delivery recipients visibility into their order ETAs is the hallmark of a well-functioning fleet, and one of the easiest and highest value actions you can take to ensure excellent customer service.

With Customer Portal from Wise Systems, your delivery recipients receive:

Text or email delivery status notifications with an ETA time window, and
The ability to track their package’s arrival via map view in real time.

You also have customizable triggers to manage who’s notified and at what interval.

Explore Customer Portal

Turn fleet data into continuous improvement

Give operations managers the visibility to identify what’s working, what’s not, and where to focus next. Performance Manager from Wise Systems lets your management team:

Compare planned vs. actual mileage, travel time, and on-time percentage
Drill down by driver, depot, or date range to pinpoint underperformance
Track trends over time to coach drivers and improve operational consistency
Export raw data for your BI or analytics team

Explore Performance Manager

Retail distributors integrate to automate routing, drive fleet utilization, and optimize routes during all stages of delivery.

Built for your ecosystem

Last-mile routing and dispatching solutions must integrate tightly with your broader technology stack. Working seamlessly with your systems of record is a hallmark of the Wise Systems delivery automation platform. It supports every stage of the last-mile delivery process – planning, execution, coordination and communication – with apps for delivery planners, dispatchers, drivers, managers and recipients and shares order, load-building and other data with your ERP, OMS, WMS or other systems

Integrate with your ERP, TMS and other backend systems, as well as your ELDs.
Use the entire system or customize a solution to fit your team’s needs.
Use the Driver app from Wise Systems or integrate Wise Systems’ data with your existing applications.

Explore the Engine

“It’s forced our whole organization to become more organized and efficient, which translates directly to our customers. They’re getting more deliveries on time. If we have an order to fill, we can rapidly get the equipment back to fill that order if we don’t have it on the available line.”

Brandon Bliss Director of Transportation, Second Harvest Food Bank of Middle Tennessee

Read our case study

Capital Area Food Bank delivers over 50 million meals a year to over half a million residents. In approaching Wise Systems, they wanted to increase on-time delivery rates to 98%, to improve visibility for company leadership, and to provide real-time updates to customers. Read how they did it with Wise Systems.

Download the case study

Let's talk.

We’d love to learn more about your routing challenges and see where we can help.

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