MICROGREEN BUSINESS · LOGISTICS
Microgreen Delivery Route Planning. What Changes Between Three Drops and Fifteen.
Delivery is the part of a microgreen business nobody plans for. You add customers one at a time, each one seems like a small addition, and then one Thursday you are five hours into a run that was supposed to take two. The miles did not creep up on you. The structure did.
The five hour Thursday
Try this. Without opening anything, name the order you will drive next Thursday's stops in, and the ounces going to each.
Most growers can do the first half. Almost nobody can do both at once, and that is the exact failure. The route lives in your memory as a shape, a driving pattern you fell into months ago, and the order contents live somewhere else, usually in messages. So you drive the shape you know, and you discover at stop 9 that stop 4 was supposed to get the extra pea.
The shape is the problem. It was optimal when you had four customers. You then added six more and never rebuilt it, because there was never a Thursday when rebuilding it was more urgent than driving it.
Concede the small case: at three drops, do not bother
If you have three deliveries, route planning is a waste of your afternoon. Drive them in whatever order feels right. The theoretical best sequence saves you maybe four minutes, you already know the roads, everything stays cold, and you can hold the whole run in your head including what each customer ordered.
Growers who buy route software at three stops are solving a problem they do not have. The tool sits there, the addresses go stale, and when the operation does grow they have already decided the tool is useless.
So the honest answer to "should I plan my route" at three stops is no. Come back at eight.
Cluster by day. This is the whole game.
Before anything about stop order, fix the day structure. It is worth more than every routing algorithm combined and it costs nothing but a set of phone calls.
Most growers assign delivery days by when the customer asked. The bakery wanted Wednesdays, so they are Wednesday. The restaurant across town wanted Wednesdays too, so they are also Wednesday. Six months later you are crossing the same 20 mile stretch on three different days of the week.
Group by geography instead. Draw your map, find the natural clusters, and give each cluster a day.
- Tuesday: everything north and west of the farm.
- Thursday: the city core and the two neighbourhoods on that side.
- Friday: the market plus anything on the way to it.
Two things improve at once, and the second one surprises people. Your drive time per stop drops sharply, because you stop re-crossing territory. And your production schedule simplifies, because you are now harvesting and packing for one geography per day rather than a scattered list, which means the pack-out is one continuous job instead of three interleaved ones.
How to actually move a customer to a different day
This is the part growers avoid and it is easier than it looks. Chefs care about the day being fixed and predictable far more than which day it is. "I am consolidating my routes so I can guarantee you a consistent morning window, would Tuesday work instead of Wednesday?" is accepted the large majority of the time, because you are offering them reliability.
Move them one at a time, give 30 days notice, and do not move anyone twice.
Why the shortest route is not the cheapest
Route tools optimise distance because distance is easy to compute. Your cost is time, and the two are only loosely related.
Work it through. A stop costs roughly 15 minutes: park, load the cooler bag, walk to the back door, wait for somebody to sign, have the two minute conversation you should have, walk back. That figure barely moves whether the previous stop was two miles away or eight.
| Ten stop run | Time at stops | Time driving | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Route as driven, 40 miles | 150 min | about 60 min | 3 h 30 m |
| Route reordered, 34 miles | 150 min | about 51 min | 3 h 21 m |
| Same 10 stops split across two days | 150 min | about 70 min | plus a second day of overhead |
A clean reorder saved nine minutes. Worth having, not worth an afternoon of planning. Now look at the third row. Splitting those same ten stops across two days adds a whole second set of fixed costs: loading the van, the drive out to the first stop, the drive home from the last, and a harvest and pack window that has to line up with it. On a small operation that is 60 to 90 minutes of overhead before a single ounce is delivered.
So the priority order is not what most people assume:
- Reduce the number of delivery days. Biggest lever by a wide margin.
- Reduce the number of stops, or rather raise the value of each one. Minimum order sizes exist for this reason.
- Then optimise the order you drive them in.
A grower agonising over stop sequence while running four delivery days a week for eleven customers is polishing the wrong thing.
The stop that does not pay
Run this on your own list. Take your smallest account. Work out the extra drive time it adds to the cluster, add the 15 minute stop, multiply by an hourly rate you would actually accept, and compare that to the gross margin on the order.
A 6 ounce order at $2.40 is $14.40 of revenue. If that stop adds 12 minutes of detour plus 15 minutes at the door, you spent 27 minutes. At $20 an hour that is $9 of your time, before fuel, before seed, before the tray. There is a version of that customer that works, and it involves a minimum order or a pickup arrangement, not a shorter route.
What actually changes as the stop count climbs
| Stops per day | What works | What breaks first |
|---|---|---|
| 1 to 3 | Memory. Any order. One cooler. | Nothing yet. Do not add tooling. |
| 4 to 7 | A written list in delivery order. Fixed day. | Order contents. You start mixing up who gets what. |
| 8 to 12 | Planned sequence. Receiving windows recorded. Cooler discipline. | Sequence in your head, and the last stop's temperature. |
| 13 to 20 | Route stored outside your head, assignable to a driver, tracked stop by stop. | You. One person cannot both grow and drive this reliably every week. |
The three things that appear at scale
Cold chain. At three stops everything is delivered within an hour of leaving. At fifteen, your last customer receives product that has been in a vehicle for three or four hours. In July that is a quality complaint waiting to happen. The fix is boring and effective: real coolers with real ice packs, and the accounts most sensitive to freshness placed early in the sequence rather than wherever the map puts them.
Receiving windows. Kitchens are not open when you are free. Many take deliveries between roughly 9am and 11am and will refuse one during service. A stop that sits perfectly at position 7 on the map but only receives until 10am has to move to position 2, and you eat the extra miles. This is why a pure distance optimiser is a starting point rather than an answer, and why you want the ability to drag a stop up the list.
A second driver. The moment somebody else drives, everything you were holding in your head has to become a document: the sequence, the contents, the door to use, the person to ask for, who signs. Growers usually discover this the first week they are sick, which is the worst possible week to discover it.
I was running four delivery days for nine customers because that is how they had each asked. Redrew it into two days on a map and moved six people. Nobody objected. It gave me back most of a working day every week, and I had been trying to solve that with a faster van.
Microgreen grower, Bucks County PA
What GLAP does, and what it does not
Route optimization is a Pro feature at $19.99 per month, or $199.99 a year. Here is what it actually does, described plainly rather than sold.
You set your farm address. The app takes the stops for a given delivery day and orders them with a nearest-neighbor pass from that address, using the coordinates of each client and adding the return leg home. It estimates the run at the driving distance plus about 15 minutes per stop. The saved route holds the sequence, the total distance, the estimated time, the current status and the team member it is assigned to, with a history of every change. From there it hands off to Google Maps, Apple Maps or Waze for turn-by-turn, because that is not a wheel worth reinventing.
The parts that matter more than the ordering, in practice:
- Stops carry their orders. Stop 6 is not an address, it is 8 ounces of radish and 4 of pea for a named account, tied back to the trays that filled it.
- Routes are assignable. Hand Thursday to somebody else and they get the sequence and the contents, not a phone call.
- Stops can be marked complete as you go, and the cache tolerates a dead zone between stops, which rural routes have plenty of.
- Routes can be split and combined, which is the mechanism for the day-clustering work described above.
- Delivery analytics look backwards, including revenue by route, so you can answer whether Tuesday earns its own existence.
- Client vacations pause the stop, and because the pause is on the client rather than the route, it reaches the production side too.
Now the honest limits. This is stop ordering, not a full vehicle routing solver. It does not take receiving windows as a hard constraint and solve around them, so if a kitchen closes receiving at 10am you move that stop up the list by hand. Nearest-neighbor is a good sequence, not a provably optimal one, and on a tight urban cluster your own knowledge of the one-way streets will occasionally beat it. Distances are calculated point to point rather than along roads, so the estimate is a planning figure, not a promise.
If you are running eight stops on one day by yourself, Google Maps and a written list genuinely covers you and the Grower tier at $12.99 a month gives you the client and order side without the routing. The routing earns its place when the run is long enough that somebody else has to be able to drive it.
See how routes work in GLAP →Frequently asked questions
How many delivery stops before route planning is worth it?
Around six to eight stops on the same day. Below that, the order you drive in barely changes the total, and you already know the roads. Above it, two things break at once: you can no longer hold the sequence in your head reliably, and the difference between a good order and a bad one starts costing you 20 to 40 minutes per run. At fifteen stops the route is one of the biggest single levers on your delivery margin.
Should I cluster microgreen deliveries by day?
Yes, and it is the highest-value change most growers can make. Group customers geographically and give each cluster a fixed weekly day. All the north-side accounts on Tuesday, all the city accounts on Thursday. Two things happen. Your drive time per stop falls sharply, because you are not crossing the same territory three times a week. And your production schedule simplifies, because you are harvesting for one geography per day instead of a scattered list.
Why is the shortest route not always the cheapest?
Because miles are the smaller half of the cost. Every stop costs roughly 15 minutes of parking, carrying, signature and conversation regardless of how close it is. On a ten stop run that is 150 minutes of standing still against maybe 45 minutes of driving. Shaving six miles off the route saves about nine minutes at typical suburban speeds. Merging two thin delivery days into one full day saves an entire trip overhead, which is usually an hour or more. Optimise the day structure first and the stop order second.
What changes between three deliveries and fifteen?
At three, memory works, order does not matter, and everything stays cold. At fifteen, four things become real problems: you cannot hold the sequence and the order contents in your head at the same time, the last stop is now three or more hours after the first so cold chain matters, receiving windows start conflicting with the mathematically best order, and you probably need a second driver, which means the route has to exist outside your head so somebody else can drive it.
What is the cost of an extra delivery day?
More than growers think, because it is mostly fixed. Loading the van, the drive out to the first stop and the drive back from the last, the harvest and pack window that has to line up with it, and the fuel for the round trip legs. On a typical small operation that is 60 to 90 minutes of overhead before you deliver a single ounce. Three ounces-light stops on their own day almost never pay for themselves. Fold them into an existing cluster instead.
Do restaurant receiving windows break route optimization?
They constrain it, which is why the mathematically shortest order is sometimes the wrong one to drive. Many kitchens receive between about 9am and 11am and will not take a delivery during service. If a stop that sits perfectly at position 7 geographically only receives until 10am, it has to move up, and you accept the extra miles. Get the receiving window in writing for every account and treat it as a hard constraint the route has to work around.
How does GLAP route optimization work?
You set your farm address, and the app orders the day's stops using a nearest-neighbor pass from that address, calculating distances between coordinates and adding a return leg. It estimates run time from the distance plus about 15 minutes per stop. The saved route holds the stop order, distance, estimated time, status and the team member assigned to it, and it hands off to Google Maps, Apple Maps or Waze for turn-by-turn. Route optimization is a Pro feature at $19.99 per month. It is stop ordering, not a full vehicle routing solver with time windows, and you can reorder stops by hand when a receiving window demands it.
Do I need route software or is Google Maps enough?
Google Maps handles the driving and it is what you should still be using for turn-by-turn. What it does not do is connect the route to your orders, so you cannot see that stop 6 is 8 ounces of radish and 4 of pea, track which stops are completed, hand the run to a second driver, or look back at what a route earned. Under about eight stops on your own, Maps plus a written list is genuinely enough. Past that the missing link is orders, not directions.
How should I handle a customer who is away for a week?
Pause them rather than deleting them, and make sure the pause reaches production and not just the route. A skipped delivery you forget to record is a tray you sowed for nothing eight days earlier. GLAP tracks client vacation periods so the stop drops off the route for those dates and the account comes back automatically. Whatever tool you use, the rule is the same: the pause has to be entered before the sow date, not before the delivery date.
The bottom line
Fix the days before you fix the order. Cluster your customers geographically, give each cluster one fixed weekly day, and defend that structure when new customers ask for something else. That is where the hours are.
Then, and only then, worry about the sequence you drive. And when the run gets long enough that you cannot be sick without cancelling deliveries, get it out of your head and into something a second driver can pick up.