Salvo 1968 Deliver a Safe and Reliable Food Supply with Podfather
Overview
Salvo 1968 is the UK's first online Italian food wholesaler and distributor, founded in 1968 as the first importer of restaurant and pizzeria ingredients from Italy. As a family-inspired business with decades of heritage, the Hertfordshire-based company serves as a leading B2B supplier, offering a national delivery service that covers central and southern England, the Midlands, and Manchester.
Operating with its own mixed fleet of 3.5- to 18-tonne temperature-controlled vehicles, Salvo 1968 manages an average of 300 deliveries a day. Since originally implementing Podfather, the company has expanded its geographical presence with regional depots in Brighton, Bristol, and Manchester, alongside launching a new frozen food product category.
25 %
Fleet saving
10 pm
Order cut off
300
Daily deliveries
Challenge
Although Salvo 1968 originally introduced Podfather a number of years back, internal barriers prevented the technology from being maximised. The company struggled to align its workforce and operational workflows with modern digital logistics systems.
- An initial lack of appetite within the business for adopting new technology or embracing alternative ways of working
- Legacy internal workflows and processes that failed to utilise the software to its full potential
- Operational constraints that restricted route planning efficiency and capped order cut-off times prior to optimisation
Solution
Following a change in management, Salvo 1968 initiated a comprehensive review of its internal workflows to reengineer how Podfather sits within the business. The new management team engaged directly with the Podfather support team to build on staff strengths and eliminate previous usage roadblocks.
The upgraded solution involved deploying new, easier-to-use handheld devices for drivers and introducing fresh software integrations tied directly into Podfather's core system. This synchronized framework active features for automated route planning and optimisation, vehicle walkaround checks, real-time ETA tracking, and electronic Proof of Delivery (ePOD) capture.
Results
Reconfiguring Podfather has delivered tangible improvements for Salvo 1968's customers, staff, and bottom line, highlighted by a 25 percent reduction in fleet size that represents major financial and environmental savings. The business has also become highly reactive to new clients, utilising optimized route planning to confidently extend its daily order cut-off time to 22:00 hrs.
Operational visibility has vastly improved, providing the internal service team, management, and clients with real-time tracking updates and automated ETA notifications. Furthermore, the transition to digital ePODs, complete with time, date, and location-stamped photographs and signatures, has removed administrative friction, allowing the company to successfully work towards becoming entirely paper-free.
Founded in 1968, we were the first importer of restaurant and pizzeria ingredients from Italy. Over the last five decades we have continued to innovate, launching the first B2B online trade platform, offering a national delivery service, and more recently using the Podfather logistics solution to streamline our processes and improve our performance and customer experience.
Rosa Gibson
Head of Brand & Marketing, Salvo 1968
