If you drive your own product to wholesale accounts, unsold stock is money off your margin. Enter one route's numbers and see your stales rate, what it costs you a year, and how you compare to a well-run route.
The wholesale value you drop across the route in a typical week.
What comes back stale, expired, or unsold — the credit you eat.
Enter both numbers to see your stales rate.
A stales rate is the share of what you deliver that comes back unsold. For food routes on a guaranteed-service model, a well-run route holds it to 3–5% of sales; 8–12% means you are over-ordering or the product is aging on the shelf. Every point you shave off is close to pure margin, because you already paid to make and drive that product.
A well-managed guaranteed-service route holds stales to 3–5% of the wholesale value delivered. 8–12% signals over-ordering or slow shelf rotation. Below 3% can mean you are under-stocking and losing sales.
Divide the value of returned/unsold product by the value of product delivered, for the same period, then multiply by 100. Weekly is the most useful window for a standing route.
Because you already paid to make the product and drive it there. A returned item is a full loss, not a discount — so every point of stales you cut is almost pure margin.
Order to real per-account demand rather than a flat standing order, rotate stock FIFO on every drop, and track which accounts return the most so you can right-size them. Tracking per-account is where a spreadsheet beats a clipboard.
Yes — no login, nothing stored. To track returns per account across a real delivery week, the free InstaMaps Google Sheets add-on logs every drop in your own sheet.