Free route optimization for food banks and food rescue
No account No cost No sales call A real optimization solver for home-delivery routes, donor pickups, and volunteer driver assignment.
Nothing to sign up for. Open the tool, download the sample workbook, replace the sample stops with yours, and run it.
Open the route optimizer Download the sample workbookWho this is for
Food banks with home delivery
Split a day's household deliveries across the drivers you actually have, respecting the hours each household can receive food.
Food rescue programs
Sequence donor pickups and pantry drop-offs so perishable food moves in one efficient loop instead of a chain of phone calls.
Mobile pantries
Plan a distribution circuit across sites with fixed open hours and a truck that can only carry so much.
Volunteer driver coordinators
Turn "who takes which stops" from a whiteboard exercise into a plan you can hand out and repeat next week.
What it actually does
This is a vehicle routing problem (VRP) solver — the same class of model commercial routing software runs, using Google OR-Tools and real road drive times from OSRM, not straight-line distances.
| Constraint | What it means on a delivery day |
|---|---|
| Time windows | A household can only receive between 9am and noon; a donor's dock is only open after 2pm. |
| Vehicle capacity | A sedan carries 20 boxes, the van carries 90. If you also track weight or pallet count, each is a separate limit the route respects independently. |
| Route time limit | Cap how long any one volunteer is out — a shift limit, not just a distance limit. Can be set per vehicle if some shifts run shorter than others. |
| Unserved stops | If a stop genuinely cannot be reached in time, it is flagged as dropped rather than silently forced in or crashing the run. |
| Mixed fleet | Different vehicles can have different capacities and speed factors. |
You get back an Excel file with each driver's stop sequence and arrival times, plus an interactive map of the routes.
What it does not do
Being straight about the limits, so nobody wastes an afternoon:
- It is not live dispatch. It plans a day up front. It does not re-route mid-shift when a request comes in at 11am.
- There is no driver app. You hand out the route sheet or paste stops into a phone map yourself.
- No live traffic. Drive times are typical road times, not current conditions.
- No volunteer database, no CRM, no reporting. It solves routes. That is the whole scope.
- It runs to a time limit, so on very large problems it returns the best route set it found in that window, not a proven optimum.
Your data
The workbook you upload is read in memory and is not saved to the server. We do cache some data on the server to speed up responses — travel times, and addresses already geocoded.
But be aware of what does leave: to get real drive times, the coordinates of your stops are sent to the public OSRM routing service, and the resulting travel-time matrix is cached on the server under a hash of those coordinates. If you paste street addresses instead of coordinates, those addresses are sent to the US Census geocoder and/or OpenStreetMap's Nominatim service, with komoot's Photon (also OpenStreetMap data) as a fallback. If your stops are client households, treat that as a disclosure to third parties — many programs handle this by geocoding in-house first and uploading only latitude/longitude, or by routing to block-level points rather than exact doors.
How to start
1. Get the template
Download the sample workbook. It has four sheets: locations, vehicles, parameters, solution.
2. Put your day in it
The first data row of locations is your warehouse or pantry. Every row after it is a stop, with its demand (or demands, if you track more than one — boxes and weight, say) and the window it can be served.
3. Upload and run
Drop the file on the optimizer and hit run. Results come back as a map plus a CSV you can open in Excel, print or share.
If your Excel columns are named differently: on the locations sheet, rename them to match the sample — those are read by name. On the vehicles sheet, columns are read by position, so keep them in the sample’s exact order.
Why it is free
I am an operations research analyst. I spent twenty years building optimization models inside Excel for manufacturers and airlines, where they stayed locked in spreadsheets nobody else could open. I have been converting them into free web tools one at a time and writing up how each conversion went.
Routing is the model that nonprofits ask about most, and it is also the one where paid software prices hardest — per driver, per month, with a demo call in front of it. There is no paywall here and no plan to add one for this use. If it saves a volunteer coordinator an hour a week, that is the point of it.
Questions, or an input format that does not fit? Email mario@kindoflost.com. I read them.
Other routing use cases
Same solver and engine, different worked example — each of these is written for its own setting. Start from whichever is closest to yours.
- Spreadsheet-in, spreadsheet-out — Upload an Excel file of stops, get back a routed workbook and a map.
- Open-source vehicle routing — What’s actually free — the Google OR-Tools engine behind this and most routing tools.
- Last-mile delivery routing — Parcel and package delivery, per-van capacity and time windows.
- Field service routing — Technician appointment windows, job duration, and per-tech capacity.
- Delivery route planner — For small businesses running their own delivery routes.
- Fleet route optimization — Multi-vehicle trucking and distribution fleets.
- Sales rep route planner — Outside sales reps and merchandisers visiting client sites.
- Courier routing software — Same-day and multi-stop courier services.
- Waste & recycling collection routing — Truck capacity and collection time windows.
Related
- Route optimizer — the tool itself, with the full parameter reference.
- Optimizador de rutas — Spanish version.
- Kind of Lost — write-ups of each model, including how this one was built.