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The intercity delivery of vegetable products, especially in packaged formats, belongs to the most time-sensitive segments of agri-food logistics. Quality degradation may occur not only during transportation but also due to stochastic delays at loading and unloading, queue formation, and deviations in handling regimes. In practice, decision-making is often based on fragmented rules of thumb, while managers need simple and intuitively interpretable tools that can quantify the trade-off between carrier profitability and customer-oriented service quality. This study proposes an integral approach for selecting a rational transport-technological scheme for intercity vegetable deliveries by combining factorial experiment planning with regression-based assessment models. The empirical basis consists of route sheets and observations from 25 real deliveries, including operation durations (loading, movement, waiting, unloading), shipment characteristics, operating costs, and acceptance outcomes. The delivery process is represented as a “grey-box” system, where controllable and conditional inputs determine two key outputs: the expected profit P for the carrier and the expected delivery quality Qz for the customer. Regression models are used because they provide a transparent, data-driven mapping from operational factors to performance indicators, enable sensitivity interpretation, and remain applicable under limited samples typical for transport operations monitoring. For the profit model, statistical adequacy is confirmed (multiple R=0.8473, R2 =0.7811, adjusted R2=0.7564, n=16, p=0.0094), with the strongest contribution associated with the average truck payload capacity qc, route length, and shipment size. The quality model is also significant and suitable for comparative evaluation (multiple R=0.8769, R2 =0.7421, adjusted R2 =0.6512, p=0.0077). To support managerial choice in a single scale, profit and quality are normalized and aggregated into an integral indicator Int, which decreases when either component deteriorates. Results show that qc acts as a natural linking variable between profitability and quality outcomes. The maximum integral effect is achieved at qc=14 t (profit about 52 thousand UAH and Int=0.94), which defines the recommended rational option under the “profit-quality preservation” compromise. Further research should expand the monitoring database across seasons and routes, incorporate continuous temperature logging and handling compliance indicators, and test robust or nonlinear regression forms to improve stability under non-normal operational variability. Additionally, extending the integral criterion with sustainability metrics (energy use or emissions) would enable broader multi-criteria decision support for cold-chain vegetable logistics.