Operational Excellence (OPEX) Insight – Thursday - October 15, 2026: Diesel Climbs, Cut Miles Not Service.

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A question a child understands, that the strongest computer cannot crack

Let us begin with something very everyday. This morning you have four places to visit: the pharmacy, the market, the post office, and school to pick up your child. Before leaving the house, almost unconsciously, you arrange in your head an order: visit which first, which next, so you do not have to double back, do not pass one place twice, and get home with the shortest distance. You have just solved, by intuition, a problem the operations world calls by the dignified name of the routing problem. With four points, your intuition solves it well. But imagine not four points, but two hundred delivery stops in one day, for one truck, then multiply by two thousand trucks fanning out from fifty warehouses. That seemingly childlike question, which stop first, which stop next, suddenly becomes one of the hardest problems humankind knows, so hard that no computer on earth can solve it to the absolute optimum in reasonable time once the number of stops is large enough.

In mid October 2026, an operations news item that seems dry touches exactly that question. UNFI, a large food distributor in the United States, said it is coping with climbing diesel prices, about 6.18 USD per gallon in mid October, up about 2.51 USD from a year earlier, with two parallel levers. The first lever is fuel price hedging, locking in a diesel price in advance to worry less. The second lever, and the true operational one, is route optimization, using a transportation data platform spread across about fifty distribution centers and two thousand vehicles, with a very compact goal: reduce the miles that must be driven. In other words, when you cannot change the price per mile, you turn to changing the number of miles. And that is the content of this piece.

One thing must be said at once to keep the standard of honesty and to separate a signal from a trend. One company doing something does not make a trend, it is only an example. But there is enough broad evidence to say that route optimization is becoming an operational priority of the whole industry, not UNFI alone. US diesel prices in 2026 are high and have set records several times, with energy agencies even raising their forecasts for the coming years. The last delivery leg, by many industry estimates, accounts for up to about half of total delivery cost, that is, where there is the most fat to cut. And the market for routing software and trip monitoring devices is growing fast at global scale. Those four things together show that the question of which stop first, which stop next is more expensive than ever. This piece will dig deep into a single tool, route optimization, with UNFI appearing only as an illustrative example, not as proof.