How to distribute food?

[ulzgoroth]

If I've got a district far from my centers of food production, how should I make sure the eatery can be stocked? The eatery alone doesn't seem to be working very well (though it's better than nothing). Would putting a warehouse next door with food crates cause food to be pulled over? Would increasing the eatery staffing make them make better supply runs?

This may bleed into a general 'how do you arrange resources to reach locations that need them' question.

[an entire Roman legion]

Originally posted by ulzgoroth:

Would putting a warehouse next door with food crates cause food to be pulled over?

this is exactly what you do. you then check the "auto hire" option und click the little double arrows next to the ressource you wish to receive. a deliveryman then proceeds to stock the warehouse according to your desired capacity.

[Pinus Alba]

You can also set up hauler stations and order them to haul food types you want. Place them near eatery. Eatery workers will fetch stuff from haulers' stations. It is cheaper and easier way to provide resources to specific buildings.

[Thaumazein]

Yep just to be clear, at the moment your eatery chefs have to walk all the way to town, pick up the food, take it back, then prepare it. So you'll get very little served. If you build a warehouse, then warehouse staff and I think spare odd-jobbers will do the hauling work. Or indeed a hauling station is an option. I like to use warehouses because you can send various goods there easily -- in later game, all varieties of food, furniture and clothes, etc...

[ulzgoroth]

I'll throw out for the sake of information that at the time of posting, I hadn't yet discovered the toggle to make a warehouse actively pull resources. The presence of that helps avoid the concern of the necessary resources just not reaching the local distribution point.

[Thaumazein]

Yep, forgot to mention the fetch! Note that if they're fetching a lot from the other side of the map, the warehouse will need to hire quite a lot of staff. I usually leave it on auto-employ and it seems to take care of it just fine. Often you'll see low workload on the warehouse, I think because the auto-employ hires them based on peak usage, and demand for fetching is spiky. If you're short on workers you can go a bit below the auto-employ level without big loss.