WeatherCue™ from WeatherGuidance® · Food delivery and couriers
Rain at dinner is a surge. Ice on the roads is a shutdown.
A restaurant's weather problem is the opposite of yours. Rain at dinner closes their patio and opens your order queue — while thinning your driver pool at the same moment. WeatherCue matches your orders, wait times and driver supply to the weather that moved them, by market and daypart, then watches our forecasts for the setup coming back and hands operations the cue: raise incentives now, message the partners, feature the promo, or pause the ZIP.
Prepared by live meteorologists dedicated to your account. Fourteen years of customized forecasting for clients in all 50 states.
Four things delivery operators use WeatherCue for
Driver supply usually comes first — it's where weather costs the most in wait times and cancellations — and the other three follow from the same cues.
Driver supply
Rain, cold and heat all spike orders while thinning the driver pool. The cue is to raise incentives in a market before the rain reaches dinner, not after wait times blow up — by ZIP and by hour, with the demand estimate attached.
Demand and surge timing
The same rain-at-dinner and first-cold-snap cues, but the action is pricing, promotions and ETA messaging: feature the right categories, set expectations in the app, and spend the promo where the weather is about to make people stay home.
Restaurant-partner readiness
Cue your partner restaurants: expect 35% more delivery orders Saturday night, prep accordingly. A partner that's ready is a shorter wait and a better rating; the cue is a service you provide them, not just yourself.
Safety and service suspension
Ice, flash flooding, severe wind: when to pause a market or a ZIP, and when to resume. That's an operations and liability decision with a real cost either way, and it deserves a meteorologist's confirmation rather than a glance at a consumer app.
What a typical delivery program looks like
Built with marketplace and driver operations. A common starting point for a handful of markets; national platforms repeat it by market with a shared cue library.
- Correlate: orders, wait times, cancellations and active-driver counts by market, ZIP and hour, matched to the weather — so a cue carries a demand estimate and a driver-gap estimate, not just a forecast.
- Cues by market: rain, snow and ice, cold snaps, heat, severe wind and flooding, each with a threshold, a ZIP list, a daypart and an owner — incentives, marketing, partner comms or safety.
- Lead time: 1–3 days for incentive and partner cues with confidence stated; hours ahead, confirmed, for surge messaging and service pauses; a 14-day outlook by market for planning.
- Delivery: email and text to market managers; API into your incentive engine, promo tools or partner-messaging system where the cue should land directly.
- Review: after each event, what fired, what you did, and what wait times, cancellations and ratings did — so the next season's incentive cues are calibrated to your markets.
Take the one-page overview with you
Everything on this page on a single sheet — driver supply, surge timing, partner readiness and service pauses, with how a program starts. Made to forward to marketplace, driver-ops or market leadership.
Start with a free trial conversation
Not a demo. A meteorologist and an analyst sit down with your business — your markets, your seasons, the number that moves when the weather does — and come back with the first cues we'd build for you. If it's useful, we scope a program. If not, you've lost an hour.
- Your markets and your weather-sensitive numbers, reviewed by a meteorologist
- The first two to five cues we'd propose, with the reasoning
- How we'd deliver them into the tools your team already uses
- No obligation
Pricing is built around the program, not a rate card: we will work with you to formulate an action plan that meets your needs and respects your budget.
Prefer to talk first? Call (512) 504-3151 or email weathercue@weatherguidance.com during business hours.
If the weather hits the bottom line, you don't need another forecast. You need the cue.
Questions delivery and courier operators ask
How is this different from the weather feed our ops team already watches?
A feed tells you it will rain at 6 PM. A cue tells you that rain at 6 PM in these ZIPs has historically meant 35% more orders and 20% fewer active drivers, that our meteorologists are confident it's real, and that the incentive should go up at 4 PM. The interpretation and the timing are the product.
Can the cue feed our incentive or dispatch system directly?
Yes. Cues can be delivered by API into your own systems, or by email and text to the market managers who run them — whichever fits how your operation works.
Do you cover service pauses for safety?
Yes. Ice, flash flooding and severe wind cues name the ZIPs and the hours to pause and, just as important, when conditions have cleared enough to resume. A meteorologist confirms both ends.
We run delivery for a restaurant chain, not a marketplace. Does this apply?
Yes. A chain's delivery arm has the same driver-supply and surge problem; it also benefits from the restaurant-side cues — staffing, prep, promotions — on the WeatherCue restaurants page. Many chains run both.
What does it cost?
It depends on the number of markets and cues and how they're delivered. There is no rate card; we will work with you to formulate an action plan that meets your needs and respects your budget, starting from a free trial conversation.
Running restaurants as well as delivery? See WeatherCue for restaurants and food service. WeatherCue also serves mass retail and home improvement and insurance claims mitigation. See how WeatherCue works.