# How Gordon Food Service made same-day delivery a competitive advantage

By FarEye | Updated: April 17, 2025

## Background

Gordon Food Service (GFS) is the largest family-operated broadline food distribution company in North America, employing 19,000 people with annual revenue of $12.9 billion. GFS delivers to restaurants, the healthcare industry, and schools across much of the United States and Canada.

## The Last-Mile Challenge

GFS traditionally uses distribution centers to deliver weekly truckloads of food products to customers. GFS wanted to offer same-day orders and delivery to their customers if they ran short of certain food items using their stores as mini-fulfillment centers. Planning same-day van delivery routes manually was time-consuming and led to inefficient routing and missed delivery windows along with an inconsistent customer experience. Clients were unable to track and trace same-day delivery orders.

GFS wanted to create an omnichannel last-mile strategy to grow its market share and increase its speed and efficiency for drivers through last-mile optimization. GFS also wanted to track and trace orders and notify customers about deliveries in pre-chosen time slots.

### At a Glance

* * *

8.6%  
By adding digital last-mile capability GFS grew their sales by 8.6% in 2021

36%  
Last-mile delivery from Gordon stores accounted for 36% of that growth

## The FarEye Solution

With FarEye’s last-mile solution, GFS now offers customers individual items delivered the same day from their GFS stores. There is no need for businesses to take a trip to a local grocery store or wait for a weekly delivery to replenish items.

GFS was able to offer their customers more choices like a convenient three-hour delivery window time and the ability to be consistent and on-time in the chosen delivery time-frame.

> “We have a huge competitive advantage over not just same-day delivery and brick and mortar, but what Gordon is able to deliver is even more towards a customer’s needs.”  
> AL CONTRERAS  
> Customer Innovation Manager

### Lasting Results

- FarEye’s solution gives GFS the ability to have capacity planning with order management.
- Drivers are routed efficiently through a driver app using optimized routes in order to hit target delivery windows.
- Managers can see orders in real-time and where they are in the delivery process.
- Customers can receive real-time updates as to where their order is through a customer app that uses track and trace.

### How FarEye Can Help You

**Experience** can help you proactively notify your customers of where their orders are and reduce anxiety and calls about the delivery.

**Route** can help slash delivery costs with real-time dynamic and constraints-based routing, enabling you to deliver on-time for all last-mile deliveries, including same day.

**Execute** provides driver tools for pickups and deliveries to enable your drivers dynamically execute same-day deliveries.