Multi-Pickup Multi-Drop Savings Calculator

A multi-pickup multi-drop route — often called a milk run — collects cargo from several suppliers or vendors before delivering it to one or more destinations, all on a single truck. It is the natural extension of multi-stop delivery: instead of consolidating only on the outbound side, you also consolidate the inbound collection side.

Without consolidation, every supplier-to-destination pairing that needs to move independently becomes its own point-to-point shipment, each carrying its own fixed costs and often pricing at a partial-load rate because no single leg fills a truck on its own. A milk run replaces that web of separate shipments with one route: pay the fixed cost and linehaul once, plus a smaller stop fee for each extra pickup and each extra drop-off.

The savings scale with how many pickups and drops share the route and how often it repeats, which is why milk runs work best for a stable, recurring network of suppliers and destinations rather than one-off, irregular freight.

Separate shipments vs. milk-run consolidation

How the calculator works

Separate-shipment cost assumes this cargo would otherwise move as (pickups + drop-offs − 1) independent point-to-point shipments, each carrying the fixed cost per shipment plus the full linehaul rate adjusted for the partial-load premium. Consolidated cost = one fixed cost + one linehaul cost + (pickups − 1) × pickup stop fee + (drop-offs − 1) × drop-off stop fee. The gap between the two is what the milk run is worth.