How do you plan delivery capacity for a peak you cannot repeat?
By Muhamed Selmani, Founder
Plan a peak from your own delivery history rather than from a sales forecast. Count drops by weekday and by site for the last 2 years, find the week the volume actually changes shape, and contract that capacity before the market prices it. Christmas and the summer event run are the two peaks a London food business cannot flex through. Capacity held for a window whether or not you call it is priced as its own line.
A peak is a vehicle problem before it is a kitchen problem
A kitchen absorbs a peak with hands. Put more people on the section, start earlier, prep the day before, and the same kitchen gets through a bigger day. Distribution does not bend that way. A van is either at your door inside the window or it is not, and no amount of goodwill puts one vehicle at two addresses at 06:00.
That asymmetry is why peak season logistics planning fails in the same place every year. The commercial team forecasts sales. Operations forecasts stock. Nobody forecasts drops. So the extra volume is absorbed by making each delivery bigger until it will not fit on the vehicle, and then by buying capacity on the morning at whatever the morning costs.
The fix is not more forecasting. It is forecasting the right unit.
Forecast drops, not revenue
Revenue tells you how much food moves. It does not tell you how many times a vehicle has to stop, and stops are what capacity is made of. Two sites each taking a larger order is a rounding error on a round. Six extra addresses for 3 weeks is a second vehicle.
So the number to pull is the drop count, by weekday and by site, as far back as your system goes. Two years of it is enough to tell a season from an accident. What you are looking for is not the biggest week — it is the week the shape changes: the point at which the round stops being the same round with more boxes on it and starts needing a different vehicle class, a different sequence, or a second run.
The four numbers a provider needs to price a peak
- Drops per day, by weekday, across the peak weeks of the last 2 years.
- The heaviest single day in that period rather than the average one, because vehicle class is set by the peak day.
- The receiving window each site can genuinely take, including the ones that change over the season.
- Which sites are new, temporary or seasonal, with the dates they start and stop.
Worked example
What a peak does to the minutes available per drop
Assumptions
- Illustrative arithmetic, not a measurement of any real round.
- This is a calculation in minutes, not in money. Adding drops to a round pulls the cost per drop down and the time per drop down at the same time, and only one of them can run out. The cost side of the same round — what a vehicle-day costs and how many drops should share it — is the density curve, worked through in the route-density piece linked below.
- Assume an ordinary week: 1 round, 8 drops, all inside a 3-hour delivery window.
- Assume the peak fortnight adds 5 more drops on the same days, in the same window, on sites already close to the existing line of the route.
- Assume door time per drop and vehicle class are unchanged.
Working
- 8 drops across a 3-hour window is roughly 22 minutes per drop, driving and door time together.
- 13 drops across the same 3-hour window is roughly 14 minutes per drop.
- The mileage barely moves. The minutes available per drop fall by more than a third.
So: The peak did not call for a bigger vehicle. It called for a second window or a second vehicle — and the number that said so was minutes per drop rather than cost per drop. Density makes a round cheaper right up to the moment the window runs out of minutes, and a peak is how you find that moment. No sales forecast contains either figure.
Christmas is a queue, and everyone is standing in it
Christmas logistics capacity is hard to buy for one reason, and it is not size. It is that the December food peak is simultaneous. Every kitchen, producer and group you compete with for a vehicle wants one in the same fortnight, so the market for uncontracted capacity gets tight and expensive at exactly the point your service standard matters most. Capacity contracted in October is bought from a different market than capacity bought in the peak week itself.
Four details are worth putting into the plan early, because they are the ones that surface late.
What changes about a December route
- The charging clock on bank holidays. Transport for London operates the congestion charge from 07:00 to 18:00 Monday to Friday and from 12:00 to 18:00 at weekends and on bank holidays, so a bank holiday drop into the zone is charged on a different clock rather than not charged at all.
- Receiving windows over the closure period. The hours a goods-in door can take between Christmas and the new year are rarely the hours in its standard agreement, and they are worth collecting in writing before the rota is built.
- Driver availability across the holiday dates. Ask for the name covering your round on each date and the name behind it, rather than an assurance that it is covered.
- The step down. The week volume drops back costs as much to get wrong as the week it rises, and an arrangement that cannot step down leaves you paying for a peak well into January.
Summer is the opposite problem: one shot, no second run
Summer festival logistics planning in London is a deadline problem before it is a volume one. Festivals, outdoor events, stadium fixtures and private catering share one property: the gate time is set by somebody who is not your customer and not your supplier, and there is no second run. A load that misses the access window does not arrive late. It does not arrive.
Heat is the other half of it. Chilled and frozen loads are less forgiving in August, door time counts for more, and an ice cream or soft drinks round can go from a monthly job to a standing weekly one for a whole quarter. That is a contract shape rather than an ad-hoc booking pattern, and pricing it as one is usually cheaper.
What an event round needs settled in advance
- The access window and the gate procedure in writing, from the event rather than from the client.
- The vehicle class the site will actually admit, which is often smaller than the load alone would suggest.
- Where the vehicle waits and what waiting costs, because an event site is where waiting time runs longest and hides best.
- A named backup close enough to reach the gate inside the window, rather than a second phone number.
- What happens to the load if the drop cannot be made: who holds it, where, and under what conditions.
What to contract, and what to leave to the spot market
The mistake at both ends of the year is treating it as one number. Contract the base — the volume that runs whatever the season does — and treat the peak as a separate, dated piece of capacity with its own start and finish.
Three shapes worth pricing separately
- The standing round. Base volume on a set schedule, with a set driver and a named backup on it.
- The peak uplift. Extra drops or extra days for a dated window, priced before the window opens rather than during it.
- Held capacity. A vehicle reserved for a window whether or not you call it. It costs more than a scheduled route because being available is the whole service, and it is the honest answer for an event weekend or a festive Saturday you cannot risk.
The plan, in the order it actually gets done
None of this needs a system. It needs the drop counts, a calendar and somebody willing to ask a supplier an awkward question in September rather than in December.
A working sequence
- 12 weeks out: pull drop counts by weekday and site for the last 2 peaks, and mark the week the shape changed.
- 10 weeks out: confirm receiving windows for the peak dates in writing, including the days sites close.
- 8 weeks out: price the base, the uplift and any held capacity as separate lines rather than one blended rate.
- 6 weeks out: get the driver and the backup named for each route across the peak dates.
- 4 weeks out: run the peak sequence once on an ordinary week, so the order of the drops is tested before it matters.
- Afterwards: compare the drops you planned against the drops that happened, and keep the file. That is next year's forecast, and it is better than anybody's benchmark.
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FAQ
Questions, answered.
When should we start planning a Christmas delivery peak?
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