How Premier Fish stopped printing 80 pages a day

Premier Fish is a fresh fish wholesaler in Salisbury. Three depots, in Downton, Wimborne and Portsmouth. Twenty-six vehicles, twenty drivers, and deliveries that go out every morning to restaurants, fishmongers and kitchens across the south of England.

Fish has a rule most deliveries don't: you have to prove it was cold the whole way. Every drop needs a temperature. Every van needs a check before it leaves. Every load needs a sheet that says what went on and what came off. For years, all of that was paper.

Eighty pages a day

Before February 2026, a normal day at Premier Fish produced about 80 sheets of paper:

• 10 vehicle check sheets, one per van going out
• 30 temperature sheets, filled in by hand at loading and at delivery
• 40 loading sheets, ticked off in the yard

That's roughly 1,900 pages a month. Filed in cabinets, by date, in case an Environmental Health Officer or a customer ever asked for one. Finding a specific sheet from three months ago meant somebody leaving the office to go and look.

Premier Fish was already using Podfather for routing and proof of delivery. The routing worked. The records didn't, because Podfather doesn't do loading sheets or temperature at delivery. So the paper stayed, alongside the software.

What changed

In February 2026 Premier Fish moved to The Wise Mile. The routing moved across. So did proof of delivery, with photos and a signature on the driver's phone. But the point of the switch was the three things that had stayed on paper:

Loading sheets in the app. The driver works through the load on their phone. What's been loaded, what's short, any notes. The office sees it as it happens, and a PDF lands in the customer's inbox when the van leaves. Nothing to file.

Temperature at every stop. The driver records the temperature at loading and again at delivery. It goes onto the proof-of-delivery PDF automatically, so the customer's record and Premier Fish's record are the same document.

Van checks before the shift. Pre-start check on the phone, with defects reported straight to the office. Stored, dated, searchable.

The drivers took to it faster than anyone expected. The phone was already in their pocket. The clipboard wasn't missed.

And the routing

Routing was the one thing that already worked. Podfather did it, Premier Fish said so, and it came across to The Wise Mile without drama.

Routes are planned in seconds, with the stops ordered across the vans to keep mileage down, so the day's fuel and driver hours go where the deliveries are.

The optimiser weighs distance, time windows, what each van holds and which depot it leaves from. A hundred stops comes back in about three seconds — planning happens while the kettle boils, rather than with a map and a marker pen.

That matters more than it did a few years ago. After wages, fuel is the biggest line in most delivery operations, and the order you visit stops in decides how many miles you buy. Running the same drops in a better sequence is the cheapest saving available to a fleet, because it costs nothing to make.

Seven months in

Since February, Premier Fish has run more than 35,000 delivery jobs through The Wise Mile, across about 1,300 routes. Thirty-six people use it: drivers, the yard, the office and the directors.

The filing cabinets are still there. They're just not filling up. On the same 80-pages-a-day baseline, that's roughly 23,000 sheets a year that no longer get printed, filed or hunted for.

When a customer or an auditor asks for a record now, it's a search, not a walk to the cabinet.

The other change was the phone in the office. Every delivery now sends the customer an email with the proof of delivery attached, and a tracking link while the van is on its way. Premier Fish's executive director, Andy, puts the drop in "where's my order?" calls at around 80%.

"It started as a way to stop printing so much paper. What we got was the loading sheets, the van checks and the temperatures all in one place, customers getting their proof of delivery by email without us doing anything, and the 'where's my order' calls down by about 80%. Every POD is searchable. It's been really good for us."

What it costs

The Wise Mile is £59 per van per month, with a three-van minimum. For a fleet the size of Premier Fish's, that's the price of the software, the driver app, the records and the customer tracking pages, with no per-user fees and no setup charge.

If you run vans and still print loading sheets

You don't need to be a fish wholesaler. Anything chilled, anything with a temperature to prove, anything where a customer might ask "show me": bakery, meat, produce, dairy, pharma. The records are the product.

There's a seven-day free trial at thewisemile.com, no card needed. Or if you'd rather see it running with a real day's routes first, book a 20-minute demo and we'll walk you through it.