Best Routes Project

• This project aims to become a pilot in which dry food distribution companies make use of the vehicles and regular lines of public passenger transport and join routes so that the product’s hair transport can save on the operating cost.
• The pilot will run in Girona and will be the seed to make this a generalized practice in the field of food distribution in the short/medium term in Catalonia.

The food distribution sector is working to minimize the costs of the logistics operation, which will imply offering food products at a more reasonable price as their own strategic challenge. This involves: reducing the number of food transport vehicles, grouping logistic efforts between distribution companies and organizing the use of the territory so that it is easy to share or use third-party vehicles renting space for transport.

Acting on these three aspects aims to improve the relationship with the territory and people. Reducing transport vehicles will imply a lower number of traffic accidents, a lowering of pollution, and a better image of social commitment and the environment of distribution companies. This will imply a reduction in operating expenses, which will reduce the prices of freight and consequently the final sale price of the products.

The Cluster Foodservice, which will support, will take part in this project, will look after the interests that it groups and will act as the main coordinator both at the project implementation level and at the level of pilot execution. On the other hand, the manufacturer and distributor associated to the cluster, Frit Ravich, will collaborate in defining the problem and will provide the materials and distribution centers, if necessary, to the pilot. Finally, the Association of Municipalities for Urban Transport (AMTU), which is the one that manages the urban mobility of passengers in Catalonia, has the capacity to organize such initiatives widely among public transport concession companies. This pilot projecte has a grant from ACCIÓ, Catalonia Government.

At the executive level, Catalan companies Sparsity Technologies and Font Packaging Group will be working on the project, which will implement the operational and computer component, as well as the design and implementation of the physical components for the transport of goods, respectively.

The innovation provided by the Best Routes pilot project implies a conceptual change that goes from using specific transport vehicles to use passenger transport vehicles to transport the dry goods to the Girona area. The objectives that are posed in this project are:

1. To have through the pilot implemented a prototype of software that is the seed to be able to scale to all Catalonia in a year and a half.
2. Have a system that can be implemented anywhere in the world easily and quickly.
3. Facilitate the transport of goods strictly following the regulations and regulations of the transport of merchandise and passengers.
4. Create a business model that allows its sustainability and improvement over time, which can be carried out through the collaboration of a software supplier, one of packaging, and a logistics company.
5. Create a model for distribution companies that allows them to save and impact this savings on their customers making them more competitive.
6. Generate a model for transport companies on regular passenger lines that allow renting luggage spaces that would otherwise be empty.
7. Boost eco-friendly delivery models in recent millennia and historic centers.

Therefore, the Best Routes project is aimed at all those distribution companies that can use power lines to transport dry food to territories where the operational cost can be high and to the companies of transport of passengers, who will find a How to monetize the load space of unused line cars.