Most delivery fleets run hot for about five hours a day and idle the other nineteen. That isn't a staffing problem — it's a demand-shape problem. The fix isn't more food orders. The fix is layering a different category of demand on top of the same fleet, with the same drivers, during the hours nothing else is asking them to move. Here's the math, and the lever.
A typical urban delivery fleet attached to a food platform sees demand cluster around two peaks: roughly 11:30 AM to 1:30 PM, and 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM. That's about five hours of real work. The rest of the day, drivers wait. Some are on the clock. Some are technically off it but unavailable for other paid work. Either way, the fleet you've assembled isn't generating revenue.
The standard responses to this don't work:
The real opportunity isn't to push more food through a five-hour curve. It's to add a second type of demand whose curve fills the other hours.
If food demand peaks at lunch and dinner, errand demand fills the gaps. The data from operators running Custom Orders shows a different curve entirely:
When you overlay the errand curve on top of the food curve, the result is something like 60–70% fleet utilization across the operating day, instead of 25–30%. You haven't added a single driver. You haven't added a single vehicle. You've added a second category of demand that happens to peak when the first one isn't.
FLEET UTILIZATION · SAME DRIVERS, NEW DEMAND 100% 75% 50% 25% 0% idle 72% of day active 28% Before food orders only + Custom Orders idle 35% + errands 37% food orders 28% After food + Custom Orders +37 pts no new drivers From roughly 28% utilization to roughly 65% — without adding a single driver, vehicle, or shift. The capacity was already paid for. The demand was the missing piece.Most operational additions involve trade-offs: you add a service line, which adds overhead, which eats some of the margin. Errand demand added to an existing food fleet is one of the rare cases where the trade-off is close to zero.
The driver is already on shift, already insured, already paid (if salaried) or already available (if gig). The marginal cost of one more trip is fuel, vehicle wear, and a small piece of dispatch time. The trip earns the full per-km fee minus those marginal costs.
Custom Orders land in your existing Orders Dashboard alongside food orders. Your dispatcher already knows how to assign drivers. The dashboard knows how to track them. There's no new system to learn, no new login, no new vendor.
Your existing customer base already has your app installed, your payment on file, and a habit of trusting you with deliveries. One email or push notification announcing Custom Orders typically generates the first wave at zero acquisition cost. Net-new customer acquisition can come later.
Three near-zero marginal costs against a full per-km fee per trip. The unit economics are some of the cleanest in the delivery business.
PER-TRIP UNIT ECONOMICS MARGINAL COSTS Driver cost already on shift ~0 Operational overhead same dashboard ~0 Customer acquisition existing customer base ~0 total marginal cost: ~$2–4 per trip (fuel + vehicle wear + dispatch slice) vs REVENUE CAPTURED FULL PER-KM FEE $68 MXN avg trip 100% stays with you no platform commission net margin per trip: ~$64+ MXN Three costs near zero against the full per-km fee. The unit economics are the cleanest in the delivery business — and the reason this lever works even at low volume.A single restaurant captures some of this upside. A chain or multi-location operator captures all of it — and the savings compound:
Operators with five or more locations typically see Custom Orders contribute meaningful revenue in the first 60 days — not because customers love a new feature, but because the fleet utilization curve was structurally broken and now it isn't.
The case for Custom Orders is strong, but two things can break it.
Failure mode one: trying to compete on price. The temptation is to undercut local errand apps aggressively to drive volume. This works against you. The drivers, the customer base, and the dispatch are your competitive advantage — not the price. Set a per-km rate that's slightly below the local benchmark, not dramatically below it. The customer's preference for one less app outweighs a 30% price gap.
Failure mode two: launching silently. If you toggle the feature on and don't tell anyone, the button gets a handful of taps. The whole capacity-fix thesis depends on real volume showing up. Announce the feature to your existing customer base on day one — email, push, in-app banner. Without the announcement, the math doesn't work because the demand doesn't show up.
It varies widely by fleet size, customer base, and how aggressively you market it. Single-location operators commonly see Custom Orders contribute a small but meaningful percentage of total order volume within 90 days. Multi-location operators see larger absolute numbers because the announcement reaches a wider customer base. The honest answer: the upside scales with your existing footprint.
Will my drivers complain about the extra work? +The opposite, typically. Drivers paid per-trip earn more because they're working more hours. Drivers on salary stay engaged during what was previously dead time. The complaint we hear is usually from drivers wishing the feature had launched earlier.
What if a local errand app is already established in my market? +Your advantage isn't being first — it's being where the customer already is. Your customers already have your app installed and a payment method on file. They'll choose your Custom Orders over downloading a separate errand app for most use cases, even when both are available. The exception is errands well outside your delivery radius, where a wider third-party network may genuinely win.
How do I sell this internally to operations and finance teams? +Lead with the fleet utilization math, not the new revenue line. Operations cares about asset efficiency. Finance cares about marginal cost vs marginal revenue. Custom Orders look strong on both metrics because they don't require new fixed-cost investment. The new revenue line is the byproduct, not the headline.
Custom Orders is the lever. Two weeks free, no credit card, full platform access. Run the math against your own fleet for one month and decide for yourself.
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