Most delivery services default to a 9-to-5 window, which is precisely when a restaurant kitchen is either deep in lunch prep or mid-service and has nowhere to put a pallet of incoming stock. Ingredient delivery that respects service hours has to land in the gaps: mid-morning before lunch cover, mid-afternoon before dinner prep, or late at night after close.
It also has to handle two different delivery patterns at once. Some restaurants order directly from suppliers to a single kitchen; multi-branch groups increasingly run a central kitchen model, where one commissary preps and portions ingredients before they’re distributed to individual branches — a route that looks more like last-mile distribution than a single supplier drop.
Delivery windows built around your prep and service times, not a generic morning-only slot.
Multi-stop runs from a single commissary out to branches, timed to arrive before each location's own prep starts.
Whether it's a single crate top-up or a full weekly ingredient restock, the same van and process cover both. Service-hour-aware scheduling
Daily or twice-daily runs moving prepped ingredients from a commissary to multiple restaurant branches.
Smaller restocking runs timed to land in the gap before lunch or dinner service begins.
A larger one-off delivery to fully stock a kitchen ahead of opening day.
Short-notice bulk delivery when a new menu item spikes demand for a specific ingredient.