What is the right delivery window for a commercial kitchen?

By Muhamed Selmani, Founder17 August 2026

Delivery windows for restaurants and commercial kitchens sit before prep and well clear of service: early enough that a shortfall can still be fixed, late enough that someone is there to check it. What narrows it is almost always the receiving site — its planning consent, its yard or service lift, its staffing. Set the window from the kitchen's timetable outwards, then build the round to fit it.

A delivery window belongs to the kitchen, not to the vehicle

A delivery is not an event in the carrier's day. It is a task in the kitchen's day, competing for the same hands as everything else on the timetable, and it arrives whether or not anyone is free to meet it.

So a window is not the hours a vehicle could turn up. It is the span in which the site can genuinely receive: someone to check the load against the order, somewhere to put it, and time left to act if it is wrong. A window that meets the first two and not the third is where delivery problems become service problems.

The pre-service window, and why it sits where it sits

Two constraints define it from opposite ends. The late edge is service: a load has to arrive with enough margin to be checked, put away and — if something is short — replaced, borrowed or worked around before the first cover. The early edge is staffing and storage: somebody has to be on site, and the goods need somewhere to go that is not the corridor.

Which is why the useful answer is a distance from service rather than a time on a clock. A restaurant opening at 12:00 and a canteen serving breakfast need different clock times and the same margin. Written as hours before service, the rule survives a menu change. A window with no recovery time converts a supplier's error into a service failure; a window with 2 hours in hand converts it into a phone call.

Receiving during service is the expensive option

It can be done. It is rarely priced honestly, because most of what it costs is paid in labour already committed to something else.

The fix is not always an earlier window. Sometimes it is a different arrangement — a nominated receiver on the shift, a secure area the load goes into, a two-stage check. Decide it in advance: the version settled at 19:30 by whoever is nearest the door is the one that produces the invoice query.

What a mid-service delivery actually costs

The check falls to whoever can be spared, which is the person who can least afford 10 minutes.
A rushed check signs for quantities nobody counted, and the discrepancy resurfaces weeks later as an invoice query.
Cold goods stand at ambient temperature while the section clears the pass.
The driver waits, and door time is billed by the minute and forgotten in the plan.

Goods-in is a process, not a doorway

In a restaurant or a production kitchen, goods-in is where delivery performance is actually measured, because the site's record is one half of any dispute. It is also the part most often left to whoever answers the buzzer.

A goods-in process that survives a busy morning

One named receiver per shift, with a named deputy. Anonymous receiving is how a signature ends up meaning nothing.
Count against the order, not against the delivery note. The note says what someone intended to send.
Check the temperature where the load needs it, and record the reading against the drop rather than in a book by the door.
Write the exception before signing, not after. A signature with a note on it beats tomorrow's phone call.
Put it away as part of receiving it. Receiving that stops at the door is half a process.
Close the loop the same day: shortfall to the supplier, credit expected, and a note against the route so a pattern shows.

Who actually sets the window in London

Ops teams often assume the binding constraint is a rule about the vehicle. In London it usually is not, and the one real lorry curfew is worth naming precisely.

The London Lorry Control Scheme, operated by London Councils, restricts goods vehicles over 18 tonnes maximum gross weight on restricted roads from 21:00 to 07:00 on weeknights, and from 13:00 on Saturday until 07:00 on Monday, including bank holidays. The threshold is a vehicle rating rather than the weight carried, and a van sits well below it, so the scheme does not reach that work. That is a statement about weight, not an exemption anybody was granted.

What does narrow a London delivery window is nearly always the receiving site itself. The commonest instrument is a planning condition on the site's own permission, worded along the lines that no deliveries shall be received at or despatched from the site outside stated times. It attaches to the land and binds the occupier. Your carrier is not the party it is written against, and no carrier can widen it for you.

Night noise is separate, and it does reach a carrier. Statutory nuisance under the Environmental Protection Act 1990 is aimed at the person responsible for the noise, which can be the operator whose crew makes it rather than the site receiving the load. A quiet unloading routine at 05:00 is not a courtesy.

Find your real window before you brief a carrier

The delivery-hours condition on your site's planning permission, in the words it is written in.
The landlord's or the building's servicing hours, frequently tighter than the planning condition.
The bay, the lift and the door: what fits, what is shared, and who else books it.
The street: red-route stopping restrictions, loading-bay hours, school streets, and where a vehicle can legally stand.
Your own staffing: the earliest hour someone can check a load properly.

Scheduling windows across several sites

A single kitchen can have the window it wants. A group cannot give each of its sites the same one, because a round is sequential and somebody is served last. The arithmetic runs backwards from the tightest constraint.

What to do when the windows will not all fit

Rank the windows by what genuinely depends on them — service time, prep, staffing — not by who asked loudest.
Serve the hard windows first and widen the soft ones. A site that could take 2 hours and insists on 30 minutes costs the round and buys nothing.
Where two hard windows sit at opposite ends of a sequence, that is two rounds. Price it as two rather than absorb it as a promise nobody can keep.
Sequence by constraint first, then optimise the geography inside it. The other way round gives a tidy map and a late kitchen.

Worked example

How one tight window sets the start time for a whole round

Assumptions

Illustrative arithmetic, not a measurement of any real round.
A round of 6 sites in a fixed sequence, 20 minutes per site at the door, 25 minutes of driving between sites, and a last site that needs its delivery by 10:00.

Working

First door to last: 5 driving gaps of 25 minutes plus 5 door stops of 20 minutes
That is 225 minutes, so 3 hours 45 minutes
The first door has to open by 06:15, with loading before that again
Let door time slip to 30 minutes per site and the first door moves to 05:25

So: The tightest window sets the start time for sites that had no constraint at all, and door time moves that start further than mileage does. A site that keeps a driver waiting is a scheduling problem, not a billing one.

The order to fix it in

Establish the real window per site, in writing, with the reason next to it, and give both to whoever runs the round — a driver who knows why a window is hard treats it differently from one handed a time. Then measure the door, because door time decides whether the window you agreed is the window you get.

Then confirm it again before a peak. What a goods-in door can take over a closure period, or in the fortnight a site is at its busiest, is a separate question from its standard window, and it is worth having in writing before the rota is built rather than discovered by a driver at a locked bay.

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FAQ

Questions, answered.

Can a delivery be left when nobody is there to receive it?

That is the site's decision rather than the carrier's, and it is a food-safety and security question before it is a convenience one. If you do allow it, write the arrangement down: where goods are left, who checks them and by when, how the temperature record is handled, and what happens to a shortfall nobody witnessed. An unattended drop with no named receiver produces a signature that proves nothing.

Do London delivery curfews stop early-morning deliveries?

Not for a van. The London Lorry Control Scheme is a lorry curfew — it restricts goods vehicles over 18 tonnes maximum gross weight overnight and at weekends — and a van sits well below that threshold, so it is out of scope rather than exempt. What usually restricts an early delivery is the receiving site's own planning condition, its building's servicing hours, or the street it stands on.

Should the delivery window sit in the contract or be agreed week by week?

In the contract. A window agreed informally moves whenever the round gets busy, and it cannot be measured — you cannot score on-time-in-full against a time nobody wrote down. Fix the window, fix what counts as arriving inside it, and fix what happens when the site cannot receive.

Is it cheaper to take 1 large delivery a week than 3 small ones?

Usually yes on the delivery line, and not always overall. Fewer visits mean less door time and fewer miles; they also mean more storage, more waste risk on short-dated lines, and a bigger single failure when a delivery does not arrive. Work it out per site rather than per group, because the answer changes with how much cold storage the kitchen actually has.

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Not a sales call. A diagnosis.

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