A New Jersey fried chicken brand grew delivery 52% by matching every order to the right courier
5 to 10 milesAbout the company
This case study features a fried chicken brand based in New Jersey with a growing, delivery-led business across multiple locations. Delivery had become a meaningful share of revenue, and the brand wanted to serve more of the customers around each store without watching costs climb at the same rate.
The challenge: a capped radius and flat per-order costs
The brand was reaching only the customers closest to each location, and the orders it could fill all carried a similar delivery cost no matter how near or far they traveled. That left two kinds of revenue on the table: nearby orders that cost more to deliver than they should, and higher-value orders just outside the radius that never got served at all.
Catering, the most valuable order type of all, was effectively out of reach. So was any growth that did not come with a matching jump in delivery spend.
The solution: match every order to the right courier
With Cartwheel, the brand stopped treating delivery as one-size-fits-all and started routing each order to the option that fit it best by distance and value. Three capabilities carried the strategy:
Routing by distance is what changed the economics. Short orders moved to the cheaper nearby rate, longer orders became reachable for the first time, and catering opened up an order type that more than paid for the effort.
More customers served, a lower cost on every nearby order, and catering finally on the map, with refunds handling themselves in the background.
Results
Matching orders to couriers by distance lifted the brand’s delivery business by 52%. The biggest single gain came from extending on-demand reach to 10 miles with DoorDash Drive, which added more than $6,000 a month on its own, while the exclusive Uber Direct rate trimmed cost on the highest-volume nearby orders. Catering contributed close to $1,000 a month, and automatic refunds recovered revenue that used to be written off. Together the changes added more than $7,300 in new monthly revenue per location.
| Monthly order volume | Revenue increase | Impacted by |
|---|---|---|
| Short-distance orders (0–5 miles): 162 | $241.38 | Lower Uber Direct rates |
| Long-distance orders (5–10 miles): 72 | $6,069.60 | Expanded reach with DoorDash Drive |
| Catering orders (0–20 miles): 5 | $943.20 | Catering expanded reach |
| Refunds ($0.29 per order) | $69.30 | Automatic refunds |
| Net new revenue per location | +$7,323/mo | across all delivery channels |
*Cartwheel starts at $65/month per location, including the first 400 orders; additional orders from $0.16 each, with rates decreasing as volume grows.
The outcome: more reach, lower cost per order
The brand now serves a far wider area than its old radius allowed, pays less to deliver the orders closest to each store, and runs catering as a real revenue line rather than an occasional exception. Growth no longer means a matching rise in delivery spend, because every order is sent down the path that makes the most sense for it. That is the difference between adding delivery volume and adding delivery profit.
