Pierce County distillery launches delivery to bring local spirits — and food — to your door

A Gig Harbor distillery with tasting rooms in Seattle, Roslyn and Eugene, Oregon, has launched a delivery program in partnership with local restaurants that remain open for takeout during the statewide shutdown of in-house dining due to coronavirus.

Created and launched in all of 48 hours, Deliver Together — as Heritage Distilling Company is calling the initiative — allows restaurants to retain 100% of the profits of each order. The only catch: you must order some whiskey, gin or vodka, but $50 of product means free delivery (or there’s a $5 fee outside a certain radius of the distillery).

Not a bad trade-off for home delivery during our two-week isolation from eateries and entertainment venues intended to stem the spread of COVID-19, so ordered by Gov. Jay Inslee as of March 17. The novel coronavirus has infected more than 1,000 people and killed more than 50 in Washington since the first case was confirmed outside Seattle in late January.

“This is a direct response to a request we saw on Facebook for, ‘What can we do to support our local restaurants?’” said Justin Stiefel, CEO of Heritage Distilling. “I woke up on Monday morning at 2:30 and the thought just kind of came to me.”

By 8 a.m., he and his team were fleshing out details on a whiteboard in their flagship distillery in Gig Harbor. By noon, employees had specific assignments while Stiefel got on the phone with several restaurant owners and managers.

So far, nine Gig Harbor restaurants have agreed to sign on: Table 47, Devoted Kiss Cafe, Millville Pizza, Gourmet Burger Shop, The Harbor General Store, JP’s Hy Lu Hee Hee, and the trio of Brix 25, Brimstone PNW and NetShed No. 9. The first two spots are up and running on the site. In Seattle, Heritage has a few restaurants in the works.

They immediately jumped on the idea “before we could even finish the sentence,” he told The News Tribune in a phone call the next day.

For Heritage, which has already cut production and tasting room staff as well as retail hours, finding a way to “refocus” other employees is literally make-or-break in these uncharted waters.

“We either lay some more people off or put them to use,” said Stiefel. “This forced us to be creative.”

HOW DOES IT WORK?

Heritage had tinkered with home delivery late last year, so it had existing infrastructure. (Washington law allows distilleries and wineries to apply to ship directly to consumers.) It dusted off those plans on Monday morning, with an in-house team of designers and web developers updating the system, including delivery areas.

By Tuesday morning, Heritage was offering spirits delivery to areas around its four tasting rooms: Gig Harbor, Key Peninsula and Tacoma; Greater Seattle; Roslyn, in eastern Washington; and Eugene, Oregon.

For “Operation Quarantine Combo,” as Heritage has dubbed the dual food and spirits program, customers head to the Heritage Distilling website and enter their zip code to view participating restaurants. The customer calls the restaurant directly to place and pay for their food order, then enters a reference number with their Heritage spirits order.

Once submitted, Heritage coordinates directly with the restaurant to deliver the customer’s booze and food to their doorstep (or driveway, for social distancing).

It sounds a bit complicated, and sure, it’s a two-step process, as opposed to third-party platforms like Grubhub, Uber Eats and DoorDash, which charge up to 30% commission fees per order. Paying the restaurant directly means 100% profits for that business. Though Uber is waiving delivery fees for orders from “small, independent restaurants” during this crisis, others have not implemented such policies nationwide.

“It’s the most transparent way that we can demonstrate that the restaurant will always get 100% of their money,” said Stiefel of this setup.

As a manufacturer, Heritage builds the cost-of-goods and overhead into its bottle prices.

“I can pay the same hourly wage and encourage people to buy $50 of product and put them in the car and drive it out there. Our margin is the same. We don’t need to take any money from restaurants,” he said.

Customers can also choose a delivery window, likely in 60- to 90-minute increments.

The drivers will technically work for Heritage, the business with the license to deliver alcohol. The idea, explained Stiefel, is to give restaurants without existing delivery infrastructure an avenue to reach more customers as business screeches to a halt.

ANOTHER WAY TO REACH PEOPLE

Aaron Shook, general manager of Table 47 and the attached venue Ocean 5, said this initiative means his shrunken staff can continue to fill community need — and add a revenue stream where most others have dried up.

The company had to lay off more than 100 workers, most of them part-time, retaining about a dozen to accommodate a bit of takeout and community services, including family meals for employees.

As he explained to The News Tribune, Table 47 didn’t have in-house delivery. Only Uber Eats will accept orders from the restaurant, but in a twist, drivers can only deliver to addresses in Tacoma, not Gig Harbor.

His team polished its takeout and delivery approach in recent weeks “to just help those that weren’t comfortable coming out to restaurants” and didn’t want to or couldn’t cook every night.

On Tuesday, Shook became Table 47’s sole delivery driver. Now he’ll work with Heritage, whose spirits are in the restaurant’s well, to hopefully get more meals to the Gig Harbor community.

“They got to work immediately looking for some creative ways to support the community and the businesses, and get out there way beyond-the-box of what they could do to help business just keep moving,” he said. “It just fit right in for what we were already trying to do.”

Stiefel expects there to be some kinks, but “this is how you adapt and move forward.”

He hopes the Gig Harbor pilot succeeds so that Heritage can expand to its other markets, where salespeople on the ground have already received the thumbs-up from many of their restaurant customers. Imagining what might happen if this isolation period continues, he asked, “What do we do if we go into general quarantine? No one can go pickup at these restaurants. This may become even more critical in the coming weeks here.”

Shook seems ready to take whatever comes because the unknown demands it.

“In this industry, we hate to test out new things live and in the moment. We much prefer to thoroughly test things before we go live with them; however, in this moment, we’ve gotta just move, and we’ve got to get things figured out along the way. We’re going to learn our way into this.”

Visit the Deliver Together webpage to start an order.

This story was originally published March 19, 2020 at 12:16 PM.