Cold-chain integrity, fragile-item handling, and tight customer time windows handled.
Grocery delivery is dominated by cold-chain and time-window constraints. Frozen and chilled goods have a sealed-bag holdover of typically 90 minutes from store-out to customer-doorstep before integrity becomes questionable, and most customers book 1- or 2-hour delivery windows. The right route planner has to enforce both. SortDrops Team supports per-stop time windows as hard constraints and per-route maximum-duration caps to enforce cold-chain holdover.
Cold-chain holdover is the dominant constraint. From the moment a sealed insulated bag leaves the store with frozen goods inside, the clock is running. Most operators target 90 minutes maximum from store-out to last-customer-doorstep. A route that picks the wrong stop ordering can easily push the last drop to 110+ minutes, breaching cold-chain. SortDrops Team supports a per-route maximum duration constraint — set 90 minutes and the optimizer refuses to produce a longer route, prompting the dispatcher to add a driver instead.
Customer time windows compound the constraint. Most grocery customers book a 1-hour delivery window, often during evening peak (18:00–21:00). The optimizer must satisfy windows AND keep total duration under cold-chain holdover. SortDrops handles both as hard constraints; if the combination is infeasible, the dispatcher is alerted and can re-balance.
Fragile items — eggs, glass jars, fruits — change the per-stop service time. A driver carrying four bags including eggs takes longer to walk from van to door than a driver carrying one bag of dry goods. SortDrops Pro service-time-per-stop is the right knob; encode an extra 1–2 minutes for fragile-heavy orders and the optimizer respects it.
A typical grocery dispatch day in a Gulf city: orders flow into the operations console all day, with two demand spikes — morning (10:00–12:00, weekend grocery shop) and evening (18:00–21:00, weekday post-work). Dispatcher imports the order roster every 30–60 minutes and runs SortDrops to assign new orders to drivers. Drivers run continuous routes — pick up at the dark store, deliver 6–10 stops in a 90-minute window, return to dark store, repeat.
The 90-minute cold-chain window forces a tight relationship between batch size and density. A high-density urban route (Marina, JLT) can fit 8–10 stops in 90 minutes. A low-density villa route (Mira, Springs) might only fit 4–5 stops in the same window. SortDrops respects this by routing on real road distance and not assuming uniform stop spacing.
Multi-temperature loads (frozen + chilled + ambient in the same van) are a common operational pattern. SortDrops doesn't manage multi-temperature compartments — that's a vehicle-fitting problem — but our route summary makes it easy for the dispatcher to verify the route fits inside the strictest holdover (frozen, 90 minutes) and not just the average.
Modern grocery delivery operates from dark stores (small fulfilment centres) rather than retail supermarkets. A dark store typically supports a 5–7 km service radius and runs 6–12 drivers continuously. SortDrops dispatch mode is designed for exactly this pattern: import the next 30 minutes of orders, optimize across the active driver pool, and dispatch the next batch within 60 seconds.
Zone density matters. A driver doing 8 stops in JLT is high-utilization. The same driver doing 4 stops across the Springs is low-utilization but still time-constrained. SortDrops shows utilization-per-driver on the dispatcher screen so the operator can re-balance toward the under-utilized driver before cold-chain becomes a problem.
Yes — Team feature. Set a per-route maximum duration of 90 minutes and the optimizer will refuse to produce a longer route. If the load doesn't fit in 90 minutes, the optimizer surfaces a 'split route or add driver' prompt to the dispatcher.
We don't manage temperature compartments — that's a vehicle-fitting choice. We do route on the strictest applicable holdover (typically frozen, 90 minutes) so a driver carrying mixed temperature is never routed beyond the strictest constraint.
Dispatch mode is built for exactly this pattern. The dark store is configured as a depot, drivers loop continuously from depot through stops back to depot, and new orders are batched into the next available loop. Multi-depot setups with 2–3 dark stores per fleet are supported on Team.
Mid-shift re-optimization is the answer — the dispatcher imports incoming orders every 15 minutes during peak and SortDrops re-optimizes the active fleet. Adding temporary peak-hour drivers is a one-click flow that doesn't disrupt in-flight routes.