Wedge

Begin with regional wholesale bakeries operating 5 to 15 delivery trucks. This niche faces the strictest daily delivery windows for the morning retail rush and suffers immediate product loss from delays, making ROI proof fast and obvious. Expand horizontally into prepared meals and fresh produce commissaries, then integrate vertically into the kitchen production scheduling layer itself.

Timing

Large context window models and real-time mapping APIs now process complex spatial-temporal constraints like production times, shelf-life, and driver locations instantly. AI models parse spontaneous texts from drivers and unstructured delay reports from kitchen staff to update routes dynamically, a task rigid operations research models historically failed at.

Why This ICP

Fresh commissaries deal with highly perishable goods where a two-hour delay means zero-value inventory. They experience significantly higher acute pain from static routing failures compared to dry-goods logistics, forcing an immediate need for autonomous, dynamic solutions.

Size Of Prize

The US market contains ~8,500 mid-to-large commercial commissaries and central kitchens that spend roughly $90,000 annually per facility on dedicated dispatch labor and recoverable spoilage or fuel inefficiencies. Multiplying these factors yields a total addressable prize of ~$765M per year.

Gap Narrative

Fresh food commissaries operate on tight daily schedules where production delays or traffic instantly invalidate static routing plans, leading to spoiled inventory and missed retail windows. Current logistics software requires human dispatchers to manually rebuild routes when exceptions occur. An autonomous dispatch layer dynamically recalculates driver routes in real-time based on live oven-to-dock production feeds and hyper-local traffic conditions.

Defensibility

Defensibility compounds through localized routing intelligence and driver-specific behavioral data. As the system executes routes, it learns unmapped realities of specific delivery docks, like alleyway access restrictions or receiving manager arrival times. This creates proprietary temporal maps and high switching costs, as reverting to generic routing destroys driver efficiency and reintroduces delivery errors.

Why This Thesis

A Service-as-Software approach fits perfectly because commissaries buy the operational outcome of on-time deliveries rather than another dashboard to monitor. By ingesting order data and directly messaging drivers with route updates, the system acts as the dispatcher, capturing labor spend rather than just software budgets.