How to roster around deliveries and supplier windows

Written by Roster Flow. Published 20 August 2026.

Bread at 6:15. Milk by 7:00. Fruit and vegetables on Tuesday and Friday, some time between 8:00 and 9:00. Dry goods on Wednesday, whenever the truck gets there. Every business that sells food or stock has a delivery timetable, and many rosters are built as if it did not exist.

The cost turns up in small ways: an opener who comes in early every day without it being on the roster, a barista pulled off the machine in the middle of the rush to sign for a delivery, a box of chilled stock left on the floor while the queue is served, and short orders nobody noticed until they ran out. This article shows how to put deliveries on the roster as work, with a time, a name and a plan.

List every delivery and its window

Start with the suppliers, not the staff. For each regular delivery, write down the days, the window it arrives in and what it needs when it lands.

Then ask each supplier for a firm window rather than "morning". A window you can rely on is one you can roster for, and a vague one leaves someone waiting.

Try to move the window first

Suppliers plan their runs, but some will move a regular customer’s delivery if asked. Before you build the roster around a delivery, see whether the delivery can move to suit the roster.

• Keep deliveries out of the rush. A produce delivery at 8:30 lands in the middle of breakfast. The same delivery at 10:00 lands in a quiet hour.
• Group what you can. Two deliveries in the same hour can be checked by one person on one trip to the back door. Two deliveries an hour apart take that person away twice.
• Match early drops to the opener. If bread has to arrive before 6:30, make sure someone is rostered to be there when it does.
• Write the agreed window down, on the delivery timetable, so the next person who builds the roster knows why a shift starts when it does.

Know what receiving involves

For food, receiving is a food safety task, not a signature on a docket. Food Standards Australia New Zealand explains that under Standard 3.2.2, food businesses must do everything they can to make sure they only receive food that is safe and suitable, which generally means food delivered from a known supplier, protected from contamination and at a safe temperature. Its guidance for potentially hazardous food is to check that chilled food arrives at 5°C or colder, frozen food arrives frozen hard and hot food arrives at 60°C or hotter, and to keep food under temperature control once it has been received.

1. Check it is your orderCount the items against the invoice or order, and note anything short, damaged or substituted before the driver leaves.
2. Check the temperatureProbe chilled and hot food, and check frozen food is frozen hard. Reject what is outside the limits, or outside the time you agreed with the supplier.
3. Check packaging and datesLook for damaged packaging, pests or foreign objects, and check that use by dates have not passed.
4. Put the cold food away firstChilled and frozen stock goes into storage before anything else, then dry goods.
5. Record itNote temperatures and problems wherever your business keeps its food safety records, and pass anything unfinished to the next shift. Shift handover notes covers how.

The same FSANZ page notes that food service businesses handling unpackaged, ready to eat, potentially hazardous food may need to show how they control receiving under Standard 3.2.2A. Time a few real deliveries doing all of this, and roster that time, not the two minutes it takes to sign.

Choose who receives each delivery

• Someone trained to check and to say no. Receiving can mean rejecting a warm box of chicken or a short order, and a new starter may not feel able to. A skills matrix shows who has been trained.
• Not the person on the busiest station. If the only barista also takes the milk at 6:45, the coffee and the milk both suffer. Give the delivery to whoever has the lightest load at that time.
• Named on the roster. Write the delivery into the shift itself, such as "receive dairy, 6:15 to 7:00", so it is clearly somebody’s job.
• With a backup. When the receiver is sick, the delivery still comes. Name who takes it over.
• Part of the opening routine. Early deliveries fit naturally into the opening checklist. Opening and closing duties shows how to put tasks and their time on the roster.

Early starts and the span of hours

Rostering someone in early for a delivery can change what that time costs, and the rules differ between awards.

The Retail rule is easy to miss, because accepting a delivery before opening feels like part of the job. A part-timer who comes in at 6:30 for a Monday delivery is working half an hour outside the span, and that half hour is paid as overtime. Current rates and amounts are on the General Retail, Restaurant and Hospitality award pay rates pages, and the Fair Work Ombudsman’s Find my award tool confirms which award covers you.

Avoid short delivery shifts

Calling a casual in for 30 minutes to meet a truck does not cost 30 minutes. Under the Restaurant and Hospitality awards, a casual must be engaged and paid for at least 2 consecutive hours each time they are required to attend work (clause 11.3). Under the General Retail Industry Award, the minimum daily engagement is 3 hours, with a narrow exception for secondary students after school (clauses 11.2 and 11.3).

• Fold the delivery into a longer shift, such as the opener’s or a staggered start, rather than creating a shift for it.
• Give a delivery shift real work for the rest of its hours: stock rotation, prep, cleaning the coolroom, restocking shelves.
• Think twice about a return trip. Asking someone to finish, go home and come back for an afternoon delivery creates a broken working day, which some awards pay for separately, for example through the split shift allowances in clause 21.3 of the Restaurant award and clause 26.14 of the Hospitality award.
• Roster the real finish for late deliveries. A delivery that lands at 17:45 on a shift that ends at 18:00 will not be put away by 18:00. Preventing accidental overtime explains why that matters.

Lifting and putting away safely

Deliveries bring a lot of the heavy lifting in a small food or retail business: milk crates, flour sacks, kegs and cartons of stock. Safe Work Australia’s model Code of Practice on hazardous manual tasks explains that manual tasks can be hazardous, so the risks must be assessed and managed. Check with your state or territory regulator whether the code has legal effect where you are.

• Roster two people for heavy deliveries, or an overlap long enough for a second person to help.
• Keep a trolley or sack truck where deliveries are dropped, and allow time to use it rather than carrying.
• Do not leave a new starter or a young worker to unload alone.
• Make space before the delivery arrives, so stock is not stacked on the floor while someone clears a shelf.

A worked example: a cafe’s Tuesday

A cafe covered by the Restaurant Industry Award opens at 7:00 and trades until 15:00. On Tuesdays it takes four deliveries: bread at 6:15, dairy between 6:15 and 7:00, fruit and vegetables between 8:00 and 9:00, and meat between 10:00 and 11:00. For months the Tuesday roster ignored them. The opener was rostered from 6:30 but came in at 6:00 to bring the bread in, the barista checked the produce in the middle of the breakfast rush, and the meat sat on the bench while lunch prep started.

The owner times a few Tuesdays. The bread and dairy take 10 minutes to check and put away, the produce 20 minutes and the meat 15 minutes. These are the cafe’s own timings, not a standard. The produce supplier agrees to move its window to 9:30 to 10:30, and the Tuesday roster changes to this.

The opener is now rostered from 6:00 to 14:30 with a 30 minute meal break at 10:30, which is 8 paid hours, and the half hour they were already working before 6:30 is on the roster and the timesheet. The break comes after the first hour and within the first 6 hours, as clause 16.2 requires. Because the shift starts at 6:00, none of it falls in the midnight to 6:00 am period that attracts an additional amount under clause 24.2.

The kitchen hand, a casual, was already rostered from 9:00 to 13:00 for lunch prep. That is 4 hours, above the 2 hour minimum engagement in clause 11.3 and under the 5 hours at which the award requires a meal break. Moving the produce window puts both of the day’s food deliveries inside that shift: 20 + 15 = 35 minutes of receiving, with the rest of the shift still going to prep. The barista stays on the machine through breakfast, and the meat goes into the coolroom as soon as it is checked.

The only extra paid time is the half hour the opener was already working before the roster said they started. The roster vs actual hours calculator shows how unrostered early starts like that one build up over a week.

Roster Flow keeps the delivery shifts in front of the team: availability and leave from staff phones, the roster published to everybody at once, clock ins that become timesheets, and approved hours sent to Xero, MYOB or a CSV file.

A delivery roster checklist

• Every regular delivery is listed with its days, window and what it needs
• Suppliers have been asked to move windows out of the rush
• Each delivery has a named, trained receiver and a backup on the roster
• Receiving time comes from timing real deliveries, temperature checks included
• Early starts are checked against the span of hours or early morning amounts in your award
• No casual is called in for less than the minimum engagement
• Return trips for a second delivery are avoided, or paid as the award requires
• Heavy deliveries have two people and a trolley
• Problems with a delivery go into the handover for the next shift

Sources

• Food Standards Australia New Zealand: receiving food
• Fair Work Commission: General Retail Industry Award 2020 [MA000004]
• Fair Work Commission: Restaurant Industry Award 2020 [MA000119]
• Fair Work Commission: Hospitality Industry (General) Award 2020 [MA000009]
• Safe Work Australia: model Code of Practice, hazardous manual tasks
• Fair Work Ombudsman: find my award

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