Food Distribution
You move 10,000 SKUs a night.Your margins are still 2%.
Selectors pick in the dark at 3 AM. Trucks roll at 4. One mispick, one missed delivery window, one pallet of expired product, and the margin on that account goes negative. We embed with your team, map every warehouse zone, every route, every credit memo, and deploy AI specialists that find what's costing you money. Not a consulting engagement. Real operational change, from week one.
The Problem
Where the money
is going.
Cost
Pick Errors & Credit Memos
Your selectors pull thousands of cases per shift across dry, cooler, and freezer zones. A wrong case of tomato sauce looks identical to the right one until the restaurant opens the delivery. Short ships, mispicks, and substitution errors turn into credit memos, driver re-deliveries, and phone calls from angry operators. Each credit costs you the product margin plus the labor to fix it. At 1-3% error rates, that's a line item nobody tracks as a single number.
Process
Route Density & Delivery Windows
Restaurants want delivery before the lunch prep crew arrives. Grocery wants a two-hour window on Tuesday. Your drivers are making 30-40 stops a day in multi-temp trucks, and every added stop changes the math on fuel, labor, and cold chain compliance. Routes get built by dispatchers who know the territory, but when they're out sick or quit, that knowledge walks out the door. The difference between a 32-stop route and a 28-stop route is the difference between profit and loss on that truck.
Cost
Shrinkage & Expiration Write-offs
FIFO is the policy. What actually happens in the warehouse is a different story. New pallets get stacked in front of old ones because the slot is easier to reach. Product sits in a cooler corner for three weeks and expires before anyone catches it. At 2-5% spoilage on perishables, a regional distributor with $50M in revenue is writing off more than most people realize. And that's before you count the product that ships close-dated and comes back as a credit.
Risk
Customer Churn from Service Failures
A restaurant operator who gets shorted on chicken thighs on a Friday doesn't file a complaint. They call your competitor's sales rep on Monday. Customer acquisition in foodservice distribution is expensive and slow. Losing an account is fast. One bad week of deliveries, one pattern of mispicks, and a $4,000-a-week account switches to the other broadliner. Your sales team finds out after the fact. Nobody connected the three credit memos to the churn risk.
How We Work
Three steps. Hands on.
We embed with your team, map your operation, find what no one could see, and deploy specialists that fix it. You get a dedicated team, not a login.
Map
We start with a structured discovery. Our team interviews your warehouse supervisors, selectors, drivers, dispatchers, and sales reps across every shift. We connect to your WMS, ERP, route planning, and credit memo systems. The result is your Blueprint: a complete, live map of how your distribution operation actually works, from purchase orders hitting the dock to the last delivery stop of the day.
Uncover
We analyze everything we mapped. Our platform finds the pick slots driving the most errors, the routes that cost more than they earn, the products expiring before they ship. We cross-reference credit memos with selector shifts, delivery complaints with route sequences, and shrinkage patterns with receiving practices. We validate every finding with your team before acting on it. Not a one-time audit. Always running, always finding more.
Execute
Every finding comes with a concrete plan and a deploy button. We build AI specialists that handle the fix end to end. Reslot warehouse picks to cut error-prone zones, resequence routes to add stops without adding hours, flag expiration risk before product becomes a write-off. You approve, they run. We stay with you to make sure they deliver.
Example Findings
What Yield typically finds.
Based on a typical mid-market company with $20M–$50M in annual revenue.
Cost
Credit Memos from Mispicks and Short Ships
$227K/yr
Cost
Perishable Shrinkage Before First Rotation
$146K/yr
Cost
Route Deadhead Miles on Multi-Temp Trucks
$72K/yr
Process
Dispatcher Route-Building and Stop Sequencing
18 hrs/wk
Risk
Warehouse Zones with Single-Selector Knowledge
8 zones
In Practice
See it work.
From day one.
Week 1
Discovery
We talk to every shift in your operation.
AI-led conversations with every warehouse supervisor, night-shift selector, driver, dispatcher, and sales rep. Not surveys. Real conversations that capture the workarounds, the slot locations everyone avoids, the customers that always complain, the routes nobody wants to run.
Month 1
Blueprint + First Savings
Your Blueprint is live. Agents are saving money.
A complete, verified map of how your distribution operation works, from inbound receiving through warehouse picking to last-mile delivery. The first opportunities are identified, and AI specialists are already reducing pick errors and flagging at-risk inventory.
Ongoing
Continuous Returns
Savings compound. Every quarter.
Yield keeps finding inefficiencies, deploying specialists, and compounding savings. Routes get tighter as stop patterns shift. Shrinkage drops as FIFO enforcement improves. Credit memos decline as pick accuracy climbs. The platform pays for itself and keeps going.
FAQ
Common questions.
Our night-shift selectors have their own pick routines and they push back hard on any changes to warehouse procedures. How do you handle that?
We interview every selector on every shift before recommending anything. The veteran who picks the cooler zone differently than the training manual says has usually figured out something the manual missed. Discovery captures those routines, and findings build on what's already working. When a recommendation does change a pick path or slot assignment, the selector sees their own error and time data behind it, not a corporate directive.
Our credit memo volume from mispicks and short ships is running six figures a year but nobody can tell me which warehouse zones or selectors are driving it. Can you actually trace that?
That's the first thing we cross-reference. We connect your WMS pick data, credit memo logs, and order records, then map error rates by zone, shift, selector, and SKU. Most distributors find that a handful of pick slots in the cooler and freezer zones drive the majority of credits. Once you see that three slots in Zone C account for 40% of your mispicks, the fix is specific and measurable.
We invested in a WMS reslotting project last year and pick error rates barely moved. Why would this be any different?
Reslotting projects typically optimize for pick path distance or velocity without looking at why errors happen. If your top error slot is a case of diced tomatoes next to a case of crushed tomatoes in a dimly lit cooler aisle, moving it to a faster slot doesn't fix the problem. We start from error data, not velocity data, and map which slots, products, and conditions drive the mistakes. The slotting changes that come out of that are targeted at accuracy, not just speed.
Our perishable shrinkage varies wildly between cooler zones and nobody can explain why some weeks we write off twice as much product as others.
Shrinkage variance usually traces back to three things: receiving practices, FIFO enforcement by zone, and how close-dated product gets flagged before it ships. We map each zone's actual rotation patterns against what your WMS says should be happening. Spikes often correlate with specific receiving shifts that stack new pallets in front of old ones, or with a zone where the pick sequence skips the back of the rack. The fix is operational, not a policy memo.
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See what Yield finds in
your distribution operation.
30 days. Real results. Or walk away.