Raw Pet Food Brands Turn Empty Drives Into Pickups And Returns
Actual Pet Foods owns five raw pet food brands in Canada. Two of them, Back2Raw in Pefferlaw, Ontario, and Iron Will Raw in St. Catharines, Ontario, delivered frozen raw pet food into the Greater Toronto Area on set delivery days for each region. Both depots sat far outside the Toronto metro, so every route started with a long drive to the first stop and ended with a long, empty drive home.
Derek Conter, Vice President of Manufacturing and Facilities, came to that problem with seven years of final mile experience. He spent them inside one of the largest final mile operations in North America, running a delivery station before moving into engineering and new building commissioning. He knew what good looked like on the road and which metrics drive final mile delivery.
Actual Pet Foods Moves Its Toronto Routes To Route4Me And Ends The Guesswork
Back2Raw and Iron Will Raw ran deliveries out of two separate depots, and Back2Raw had been planning routes in a different routing platform. In early 2025, both locations moved to Route4Me under one contract, with more seats.
The goal was simplicity and cost savings: one platform, one contract and one way of planning routes across both brands. Conter pointed to two reasons for choosing Route4Me: the delivery volume already running through Iron Will Raw and how fluent his team was in the software.
Once the customer database was in Route4Me, Conter planned a few routes himself and had no issues using the software. Select the customer, load the orders and stops, optimize, and Route4Me laid out what the route would look like. Optimized routes also reduced daily mileage on trucks that had been covering 400 to 600 km a day.
Route4Me Adds Last-Minute Pickups While Drivers Are Already On The Road
Each delivery day belonged to one region of the Greater Toronto Area. Inside a region, the routes were efficient. The challenge sat at both ends of the day, where the legs between the depot and the first and last stops ran 120 to 160 km. On some routes, as much as 70 percent of the distance ran empty.
A dispatcher at the depot could add an address to a live route and reoptimize it while the driver was already moving, and the driver saw the updated day in real time on the mobile app. When a raw material pickup came up, Conter went straight to the dispatcher running Route4Me and asked her to find a way to make it happen. He called that flexibility the best thing ever.
Raw material pickups, retailer pickups and customer returns went onto the return leg once or twice a week, all scheduled directly in Route4Me. When a retailer needed to send back product over a customer issue, the driver picked it up on the way home. Each return picked up that way saved Actual Pet Foods $150 to $300 in shipping.
Actual Pet Foods Cuts Fuel And Maintenance Costs 5 To 10 Percent
Cargo vans covering long daily distances are not cheap to repair. Route4Me gave the team the miles and kilometers driven by each vehicle, so they could schedule when each van needed to go in for service and decide which van to use. Driver feedback on trips to the shop went into the same decisions.
Over roughly 18 months, route optimization saved Actual Pet Foods 5 to 10 percent on both maintenance and fuel, according to the company’s customer service team
About Actual Pet Foods
Actual Pet Foods owns five raw pet food brands in Canada, including Back2Raw in Pefferlaw, Ontario, and Iron Will Raw in St. Catharines, Ontario. The company sells through partnerships with distributors and retailers.
