How Delivered Fresh Reduced Produce Pack Line Times by 40% with Local Food Marketplace
Eight Ways to Save Hours on Your Pack Line This Summer
Summer means longer days… and more hours at the pack line. Keeping large inventories organized and fulfilling custom orders for your shoppers takes work. With the amount of time and labor you spend packing orders, expanding sales channels or offering more variety to your customers may seem impossible.
Delivered Fresh is an online food hub that aggregates products from over 60 local farmers and delivers to hundreds of homes each week. For Delivered Fresh, managing their produce pack line started to get out of hand during the explosive growth of online ordering at the beginning of the pandemic.
But by stepping back and analyzing their process, Delivered Fresh was able to make a series of small changes that ultimately reduced their pack line time by 40%. How did they do it? Read on for eight ways Delivered Fresh is saving time on their pack line this summer—and how LFM can help.
Delivered Fresh uses Local Food Marketplace’s software to power their online hub. From generating pack lists to creating delivery routes, LFM’s features help support hubs, farmers, and markets grow without increasing time and labor costs. Reach out today to schedule a software demo and learn more about how LFM can help you save time and take on more orders.
Eight Ways to Save Time on Produce Pack Lines
1. Where to Start: Analyze your Process.
At the heat of the pandemic, the six-person order fulfillment team at Delivered Fresh was sometimes working past one in the morning to pack weekly orders. So how did they reign in this process to their current system, which takes a fraction of the time? According to Operations Manager David Nowacoski, the first step was to figure out what wasn’t working.
We started to time our process from the moment we received products to the moment they were out the door. And then we started looking at every step and asking, how can we make it better?”
By analyzing their current process, the team at Delivered Fresh was able to identify bottlenecks in the process. David encourages businesses to get out a stopwatch and time your process.
David advises food hub managers to identify exactly what is slowing you down before making any changes. “Don’t try to implement something unless you know the problem you’re addressing.”
After fully analyzing their process, the following adjustments saved Delivered Fresh hours of time on order fulfillment.
2. Count and organize product as soon as it’s received.
Simplifying your packing process starts from the moment a product enters your warehouse.
Common mistakes in the receiving stage include not counting incoming product. If a shipment is misdelivered or incorrectly harvested, that’s something you’ll want to know as soon as you receive the product—not on delivery day when you realize you’re short a case of carrots for your wholesale orders.
The Delivered Fresh team uses LFM to generate a pick list to double check and organize producer deliveries.
Delivered Fresh works with over 60 producers—so organization and communication with each producer is key.
We asked David: How do you streamline communication between the hub and all your producers?
That’s something that Local Food Marketplace has taken care of for us from day one. From the automated pick list going out the door, to the ability to just send a message to all the producers—we don’t need to add anything to the equation. LFM’s system handles the communication piece really well for us.” – David Nowacoski
3. Pre-pack: Break down larger cases right away.
Rather than immediately putting cases of food into storage when they arrive, the team breaks down the products into smaller sizes. For example, a 50-pound box of potatoes will get broken down into one-pound bags, which are easier to grab later and toss into bags for customer orders.
This way, they know how many cases of each product to set aside upon arrival for larger wholesale orders. After that, they can focus on breaking down the rest of the larger cases into smaller sizes for customer orders.
Weighing and packaging vegetables as soon as they arrive at the hub is a huge time saver. And the team uses a picklist generated by LFM to make sure they have the right amount of product available for final orders.
4. Plan Your Routes Efficiently!
Delivered Fresh doesn’t wait until the day of to plan their delivery routes. Luckily, this process is made easy through LFM’s integration with Routific. This routing software is able to quickly plan efficient delivery routes that help drivers hit the most stops in the least amount of time and mileage.
After generating a series of routes in the system, the team creates a summary sheet for the delivery driver that lists the address for each stop, as well as customer names and phone numbers.
5. Decide what works best for your packing lists: Paper or Digital.
Even in a digital world, paper has some advantages.
The staff likes to use paper for the convenience of quickly checking off items, circling products that haven’t been packed, writing notes in the margin, or carrying the list around with them to the walk-in freezer – where carrying iPads wouldn’t be practical or possible.
However, digital does come in handy for Delivered Fresh. Delivered Fresh sells some products “by the pound” rather than “by the each.” Selling by weight can trip up many online ordering systems, but it’s not a problem with LFM. The staff at Delivered Fresh weigh out products sold by pound when packing orders, and then use an iPad to edit weights directly on customer order forms within LFM. This automatically updates and calculates prices.
6. Create Stations on Your Pack Line
The day before delivery, the Delivered Fresh team starts packing orders.
To efficiently manage your pack lines in a bustling hub like Delivered Fresh, assign different staff to each of the sections of your inventory space, such as freezer, walk-in cooler, or dry goods area.
At Delivered Fresh, the staff splits responsibilities into three areas (freezer, fridge, and shelf), and then generates pack lists for each staff member. The checklists are sorted by product to make it easy for staff to pull orders together.
We really need to be as quick as possible packing orders, and being able to sort by product on LFM is perfect. We can sort the packing list just for frozen items for our staff working in the freezer. For stuff like that—LFM just works perfectly.”
LFM offers versatile sorting options for pack lists, allowing grouping by order, product, customer location, route, producer, or packing order.
An LFM-generated packing list grouped by product.
7. Save the fragile products for last!
You’d never want your cashier at the grocery store to put a loaf of bread on the bottom of the bag. Apply this same logic to the order you pack customer orders.
We don’t prepack eggs. We wait until just before they go out the door to avoid breakage. And we don’t prepack bottles of milk because they’re just too bulky. So staff will circle those items on the shelf so the packers of the truck know to grab those items.”
8. Pack/Load Products in Reverse Order of Delivery
Once bags from all three stations are filled, they are added to a small cooler for each customer. Coolers are placed in the fridge in reverse order of delivery, to be ready to go in the truck the next day.
On delivery day each Thursday morning, the team follows a Route Summary Sheet to place orders in the truck in the most logical order—so that the first order to be delivered is the last one placed in the truck.
The small amount of time planning and arranging the correct order to load up the van can save delivery drivers hours of time a week when delivery product.
9. Double Check Products as You Load the Van
The last thing you want is to leave an order behind! Even if you team has packed every order perfectly, you should still double check to avoid mistakes.
When loading the van, the driver at Delivered Fresh uses a Route Summary Sheet from LFM to confirm that every order makes it to the truck.
We all make mistakes – but a strong inventory management system makes it easier to correct them. If the Delivered Fresh team finds some leftover products after the van has been loaded, they can sort orders by product within LFM to check which customers were meant to have that product.
The Results:
Prior to streamlining their process, Delivered Fresh needed three dedicated delivery days to get all their orders out the door. After analyzing bottlenecks, the hub delivers the same number of orders in just two delivery days. Getting their fresh food sooner has made a world of difference to Delivered Fresh’s customers.
Ready to find time savings that even your customers will notice? Reach out to LFM today to learn more about how our software can help you streamline your process.
Streamline your system. LFM helps you save time where it counts.
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How LFM Can Help.
Looking to cut down your time on the pack line? Here are just some of the features that are helping hubs like Delivered Fresh cut their packing time by over one third this summer:
- Automated Pick and Pack Lists
- Efficient Route Planning
- Automated producer and customer communication
Join us for a free demo to learn more.
Check out the resources below to learn more about how LFM is helping local food grow:
- Learn how farmers are using data to grow profit.
- Looking to save time? Here’s how to gain 20 hours a week.
- Check out our free Guide to Increasing Average Order Value
- Read about how LFM helps one food hub work with over 50 producers:
- “What helps is that LFM is organized in a way that as producers, we list inventory ourselves, set prices, and describe our own products. We maintain the transparency of sourcing—you can see where every product comes from and customers value that.” –Kate Donald, Stout Oak Farm
- Want to keep up with all things Local Food Marketplace? Join our email list!
