Billing for what was delivered, not what was loaded.

Delice de France has supplied frozen bakery products to the UK’s foodservice and retail trade since 1984: breads, viennoiserie, cakes and savouries, alongside chilled lines and some ice cream distribution. Its delivery network runs from its depots across England, Scotland and Wales.

A typical delivery day starts with drivers loading up in the morning and heading out to make between 10 and 30 deliveries on their routes before returning to depot. Multiply that across the network and the operation completes hundreds of thousands of drops a year, each one now carrying its own digital record.

The trigger was the billing sequence. Delice de France wanted a system that could confirm exactly how many boxes were being handed over before the customer was billed, so that an invoice would only ever reflect what physically arrived and the cycle of retrospective credits could be broken.

The other reason was eliminating paper. Printing invoices and inspection sheets every night sat badly with the company’s sustainability goals, and an electronic proof of delivery (ePOD) solution removed the print run. The photographs came as a bonus: definitive proof of what was delivered and where it was left, in direct support of the customer service team.

The rollout started deliberately small. The first live deliveries ran on 28 October 2024 with a single driver on a single route, scaling to nine drivers and nine routes within four days. From there, training was done in person: drivers were met each morning, a set number were brought onto the app each day, and quick-reference documents travelled with them in the cab. Each depot was fully operational by the end of its training week.

Drivers of all ages and levels of comfort with technology picked up the app quickly. The few early snags, such as the wording of some vehicle-inspection questions and the flags for cash collection, were simple fixes.

Across roughly 250,000 delivered orders in February to July 2026, 99.86% carry a captured signature, 99.79% of site visits have at least one photograph, and 96.3% of deliveries carry a GPS stamp. When a customer asks for a POD or disputes a drop, customer service no longer routes the question through transport: they open the visit record, see the signature, the photo and the location, and answer directly.

The billing change removed the loop that used to sit behind it all. Customers are no longer billed for stock that did not arrive, and the retrospective credit workload that once needed its own team has reduced significantly.

Since go-live, drivers have recorded 89,798 vehicle inspection reports through the app. Start-of-day and end-of-day checks run across 161 vehicles, at 4,000 to 5,000 inspections a month. Every report carries the driver’s signature, and photographs are attached directly to any defect. Exceptions are emailed to the transport team automatically: 14,266 alerts since August 2025.

Where inspection sheets were once printed, the record is now a permanent digital store. The transport team can assess what the driver ticked with the photograph right there, and the paper print run has gone.

For foodservice distributors still running deliveries on paper, Alistair’s advice is straightforward.