IceBossPro Blog — Packaged Ice Delivery

Calculating Restock Quantities for Bagged Ice

Every stop on a packaged ice route ends with one decision: how many bags do we leave? Get it wrong on the low side and the merchandiser sells out before your next visit, handing the sale to the customer who stocks their own. Get it wrong on the high side and the freezer jams, bags fuse into a solid block, and you carry melt and shrink you will never bill for. The whole point of restock math is to land in the narrow window between empty and overpacked, stop after stop, without a driver having to do arithmetic in a hot parking lot. Good packaged ice delivery software does that math the instant the driver counts the freezer.

The core formula: par minus remaining

At its simplest, a restock quantity is the par-level minus whatever is still in the box. If a convenience store's merchandiser holds a par of forty bags of 20lb ice and the driver counts twelve left over from last week, the top-off is twenty-eight. That subtraction is trivial on one SKU at one stop, but a real route runs thirty or fifty stops, each with two or three bag sizes and a different par. Doing it by hand invites tired-driver errors, and every error is either a stockout or a melted overfill. The software holds the par for each SKU at each location and returns the delta the moment a count goes in, so the driver reads a number instead of computing one.

Counting the remainder honestly

The subtraction is only as good as the remaining count, and that count is the one piece a person still has to eyeball. A driver opens the merchandiser, counts eight bags of 7lb and fourteen of 20lb, and taps those into the stop screen. From there the packaged ice delivery software fills the box back to par automatically. Over several visits those remaining counts become a history the system reads: a store that consistently has three bags left before a forty-bag top-off is turning almost its entire par every cycle, which is a loud signal the par is set too low for the traffic that location actually gets.

Turn rate raises the par before you sell out

A flat par works until the season moves. A lakeside store that turns twenty bags a week in April can turn a hundred over a July holiday weekend, and a subtraction against a spring par will leave that freezer empty by Saturday noon. This is where restock math has to look forward, not just backward. Because the software already tracks how fast each SKU depletes between visits, it can flag when a location's turn rate is outrunning its par and prompt you to raise the target before the stockout, not after the angry phone call. The restock quantity for the next visit then reflects real demand instead of a number somebody set once and forgot.

Delivery frequency changes the answer

The same par produces a different restock depending on how often you show up. Cut a store from twice-weekly to once-weekly service and each visit has to cover twice the sell-through, which means either a larger merchandiser or a driver who plans deliberate overfills into cooler backup storage. The software ties the restock quantity to the delivery schedule so the number accounts for the gap until you return. Skip a holiday, and the pre-holiday top-off should carry the account through the closure — the system knows the next scheduled visit and sizes the drop to bridge it.

Overfill, freezer capacity, and shrink

Restock math is not just "fill it up." A merchandiser has a physical ceiling, and pushing bags past it is how you get crushed product, doors that will not seal, and melt running down the back wall. The software caps the calculated restock at the freezer's stated capacity so a driver is never told to cram sixty bags into a fifty-bag box. Any product that melts or is pulled as damaged gets logged against the account, which keeps your shrink numbers honest and, over time, tells you whether a location's par is genuinely right or whether you are quietly losing bags to overfill every single week.

Why a spreadsheet cannot keep up

Owners often start with a printed route sheet and a mental par for each stop. That works for ten accounts and collapses at fifty, because the numbers change with weather, season, and a customer who added a second freezer last month. Purpose-built packaged ice delivery software keeps every par, every remaining count, and every turn rate in one place and recomputes the restock on the spot, so a fill-in driver gets the same right number the owner would have reached. The math stops living in one person's head and becomes something the whole operation can run.

Restock quantities also depend on which SKUs a given account carries and how those bags and blocks are set up in your catalog. For a related look at how those items are defined, see Blocks, Cubes, and Bags: SKUs in Packaged Ice Software.

The payoff: fewer stockouts, less melt

When the restock number is calculated instead of guessed, two things shrink at once: the days a freezer sits empty and the bags that melt from being overpacked. Drivers move faster because they trust the number on the screen, the office stops fielding "we ran out" calls, and your billed volume tracks real sell-through instead of hopeful overfills. That is the quiet return on doing restock quantities right — steady product on the shelf and less water down the drain.