New brewery here, hitting our first problem that I could really use some help with.
We are lucky enough to be receiving orders from outlets for between 3-12 crates of beer at a time. (20 x 330ml bottles in crate)
We have been delivering ourselves locally and into London but now we are getting orders from locations that we do not have time do drive to.
I could really use some recommendations for couriers or any other way of getting our beer delivered.
We incentivise larger orders 6+ crates with free delivery but are struggling to make margin on this.
Am I missing something obvious? How do you get your beer to the shops? There doesn’t seem to be any reasonably priced courier for heavy, large, fragile cargo.
A crate measures 32 x 24 x 24 cm weighing 11.4 kg.
Not familiar with this sort of stuff on the brewery side of things but a large number of UK bottleshops use APC as they’re currently the only UK courier offering a dedicated fragile/liquids handling service.
The size and weight of your crates sounds fairly standard and the sort of thing APC handle and deliver on a daily basis, so I’d strongly recommend looking into them. As far as I know you get better rates the more you use them, so it might be a little expensive right now, but as you grow you could hit better margins.
As a consumer I always push for bottleshops to use APC if feedback is requested on the couriers they use, as they are miles ahead of any other UK courier when it comes to alcohol distribution.
Dont use ipostparcels. Attrocious reputation for losing parcels in their depot. Ive lost two expensive parcels and know others who’ve lost parcels the same way. Id echo what was said above, most breweries use APC due to bad service from other couriers
Agree with minutemat and LazyPyro, have had issues with ipostparcels with damaged/ returned parcel and they wouldn’t refund as they don’t take liquids (for non-commercial customers anyway), while APC seem to be the one most stores/online sites are using
I’ve used iparcels about 7 times to Europe in the last 12 months & not had any problems.
Good tracking & quick delivery.
That’s just my experience & obviously others have had different experiences.
