Delivery Software for
Restaurants and Food Operations
DoorDash takes 30%. Your own drivers don't. Raute gives independent restaurants, ghost kitchens, catering operations, and meal-prep companies the tools to run delivery in-house — route optimization, live tracking, and proof of delivery from $24.99 a month.
No credit card required. Cancel anytime.
Food delivery has its own rules
The same tools that work for parts couriers fall apart when the cargo is hot, perishable, or needs to land at exactly 12:15.
Food gets cold fast
Every minute on the road is a minute the soup gets sad. Routes have to be short, smart, and respect cooking time, not just driving time.
Time windows are everything
A wedding lunch at 12:00 is not a 12:30 lunch. Catering, meal-prep, and even regular dinner orders have hard time windows that generic route planners ignore.
Order volume spikes hard
Quiet at 10am, 60 orders between 6 and 8pm. Dispatch needs to scale from 0 to chaos and back without spreadsheets in the middle.
Drivers are part-time
Restaurant delivery is rarely a 9-to-5 fleet. Software needs to be obvious enough that a new driver can use it on shift one without training.
How Raute fits a food operation
Tuned for hot food, tight time windows, and a kitchen that doesn't stop.
Paste orders straight from your POS or email
Toast, Square, Clover, third-party order emails — paste the export, the AI parser pulls customer names, addresses, and notes.
- Reads POS exports, order emails, and CSVs
- Cleans up "Apt 4B (back door)" style notes
- No API integration required to get started
Time-window routing that respects the kitchen
Tell Raute when an order leaves the pass, and the route plans around it. No more sending a driver out with a salad that has to wait 20 minutes for the entree.
- Per-order ready times and delivery windows
- Routes re-optimize as new orders come in
- Catering stacks: multiple drops at one venue
Live ETAs for the customer (and the host)
Send a tracking link with the order confirmation. The customer sees a real ETA, the host stops calling the restaurant to ask where lunch is.
- Branded tracking link (your name, not a 3rd party)
- Real-time ETA updates as the route progresses
- Auto-text on dispatch and on arrival
Proof of delivery for catering and corporate
Corporate accounts want a paper trail. Capture the contact name, a photo of the food on the table, and a timestamp tied to the office address.
- Photo, signature, or contact name capture
- Auto-emailed to the buyer for invoicing
- Settles "it never arrived" disputes in seconds
A driver app a part-timer can pick up in 5 minutes
No training videos. Open the app, hit "Start route", drive to the pin, tap "Delivered". That is the whole shift.
- iOS + Android, works in low-signal areas
- Big tap targets, one screen for what matters
- Driver onboarding takes a single SMS invite
Run multiple kitchens from one dashboard
Ghost kitchen operators and meal-prep companies usually run 2 or 3 brands out of the same kitchen. Raute treats them as one fleet, with per-brand tracking pages.
- Multi-brand support out of the box
- Per-driver and per-brand reporting
- CSV exports for accounting and payroll
Worked example: a meal-prep company doing 200 deliveries on Sunday
The real cost of doing this with spreadsheets, and what Raute changes.
The DoorDash route
- 200 orders × $20 average × 28% take rate = $1,120 lost every Sunday.
- You don't get the customer email. You can't market to them.
- Bad delivery experience reflects on your brand, not the platform.
- Annual cost of giving away that margin: ~$58,000.
In-house with Raute
- 5 part-time drivers, 40 stops each, optimized in under a minute.
- Time windows respected, hot bags arrive hot.
- Customers get a branded tracking link, not a third-party logo.
- Raute Pro: $59.99/mo. Driver pay: still much less than 28%.
The math
Replacing third-party fees with your own drivers and Raute Pro saves a typical meal-prep operation tens of thousands a year — while keeping the customer relationship and the data.
Who Raute fits in food delivery
We see the same patterns across thousands of food businesses. If any of these sound like you, Raute will probably feel obvious within the first hour.
Independent restaurants leaving the third-party apps
A small in-house delivery program turns delivery from a 30% margin tax into a real channel. You pay a driver, you keep the customer, you control the experience. Raute handles the dispatch and tracking that used to make this hard.
Ghost kitchens running multiple brands
One kitchen, three virtual brands, one fleet of drivers. Raute treats them as a single dispatch board with per-brand tracking pages, so the customer never sees the kitchen behind the curtain.
Catering operations with hard delivery windows
Corporate lunch at 11:45. Wedding hors d'oeuvres at 5:30. The math on a missed window is much more expensive than a regular delivery — Raute respects time windows on every stop and warns you if a route is set up to fail.
Meal-prep companies running Sunday batches
150 to 500 deliveries in a single Sunday push, all in one metro. Multi-driver routing, branded tracking, and cold-chain photo POD make Sunday the easy day instead of the chaotic one.
Pricing that beats one DoorDash order
Starter is $24.99/month for up to 5 drivers and 500 orders. Pro at $59.99 covers 15 drivers and 2,000 orders — about 8 catering deliveries' worth of saved third-party fees.
See full pricingFood delivery FAQ
Why would a restaurant run its own delivery instead of using DoorDash or Uber Eats?+
The third-party apps take 25 to 30 percent per order and own the customer relationship. Restaurants running their own drivers keep the margin, the customer data, and control of the experience. The piece that used to be hard — dispatching, routing, and tracking — is what Raute solves at $24.99 a month.
Does Raute work for hot food delivery where every minute matters?+
Yes. Routes are optimized for short, time-sensitive trips. You can set per-order time windows so the planner never bundles a 6:30 dinner with an 8:00 drop. Drivers see the next stop the second they tap "delivered" on the previous one.
Can Raute handle catering deliveries with multiple drops to the same office park?+
Yes. Catering operations can stack drops by venue, capture proof of delivery with the contact name and a photo, and send the customer a tracking link with an accurate ETA so the lunchroom knows when to set up.
Does Raute integrate with restaurant POS or order systems?+
You can paste orders directly from your POS exports, forward order confirmation emails, or upload a CSV. The AI parser handles messy formatting so you do not need a custom integration to get started.
Is there a free trial?+
Yes. Every new account gets a 7-day free trial with full access to all features. No credit card is required.
Keep reading
The complete route optimization guide →
How smart routing turns a 90-minute spreadsheet job into a one-click decision.
AI order parsing explained →
How to turn POS exports and order emails into structured stops in seconds.
Proof of delivery: a practical guide →
What to capture, what to keep, and how to back up corporate catering accounts.
Raute vs Circuit →
A clean side-by-side for small food teams choosing their first delivery tool.
Solutions: couriers →
Same platform, tuned for same-day couriers and B2B local delivery.
Solutions: ecommerce fulfillment →
For DTC brands and fulfillment teams handling local delivery.
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