Thanks to Carrollton-based Delivery Solutions, when it comes time to pour your favorite glass of red, you don’t have to wait long before uncorking a bottle from Total Wine & More — and you don’t even have to leave the house to do it.

Delivery Solutions announced today that it would be lending its SaaS logistics middleware to Total Wine & More so the nationwide spirits retailer could roll out same-day delivery.

“We have been at the forefront of home delivery and continue to overcome logistical complexities with the evolution of technology.”
Manil Uppal

Delivery Solutions’ proprietary “last-mile delivery management platform” provides click-to-door service of white label products anytime, anywhere (within radius of a location of the store, that is), which eliminates the challenges traditionally associated with alcohol delivery.

“We have been at the forefront of home delivery and continue to overcome logistical complexities with the evolution of technology,” Delivery Solutions Founder Manil Uppal said in a statement. “Total Wine & More is on the cutting edge of intelligent delivery and Delivery Solutions is proud to power their last mile strategy.”

How it works

Third parties aren’t legally able or available to deliver in some states, but Delivery Solutions’ custom-tailored solutions and external associations gets around that. Strong relationships with popular services such as Deliv and DoorDash enables nationwide third-party delivery, but for Total Wine & More specifically, a partnership with last-mile delivery company Onfleet allows for employees to utilize in-house delivery.

[Graphic: Courtesy Delivery Solutions]

The ‘plug and play’ platform that Delivery Solutions offers provides end-to-end delivery for some of the largest retailers in the country. Once the platform is integrated with a retailer’s system, the delivery is optimized independently of the actual service used to perform point-to-point logistics. That way, the end-customer is provided a consolidated, real-time view of their delivery’s life cycle.

“The immediate future for Delivery Solutions is to build on our offering where white label last mile delivery options are available out of the box on our platform for retailers — plug and play same day delivery,” Delivery Solutions Founder Arshaad Mirza told Dallas Innovates.

Mirza told Dallas Innovates, in looking forward, he sees the company’s “orchestration intelligence taking center stage” as home delivery is made available across a wide variety of products. The concept would be the ability to intelligently map delivery options based on cart — pickup trucks for furniture, cold chain for perishables, or autonomous vehicles where available.

Origin story

Arshaad Mirza

Delivery Solutions was born out of Dallas-based Lash Delivery, a food and alcohol delivery service founded in 2015 by Uppal and Mirza. Lash Delivery is responsible for providing solutions to some of the major players in the Texas last-mile delivery industry, such as H-E-B, Instacart, and Klink.

But in 2016, the company was acquired by a grocery retailer, and the next year, Delivery Solutions was born.

Manil Uppal

Uppal and Mirza left big careers in tech — Cisco Systems and EMC, respectively — to launch Lash Delivery, and have continued to pursue the last mile food and alcohol delivery business with the Delivery Solutions logistics platform and growing roster of customers and delivery partners.

Total Wine & More joins TGI Friday’s, Austin’s Pizza, Mama Fu’s, and more with the implementation of the Delivery Solutions platform.

The playing field

The company isn’t alone in the food and alcohol delivery business. Competition includes Amazon Prime, which rolled out their two-hour grocery delivery in Dallas this summer; local liquor stores that partnered with Postmates last year when the internet delivery service expanded beyond California to Miami, New York City, Austin, Dallas, and Houston; and last month’s local launch of Denton Alcohol Delivery.

In a way, it’s interesting the alcohol delivery space is so crowded given Texas’ notoriously complex liquor laws that date back to the end of prohibition, and which tightly regulate who can ship alcohol and how it can be shipped. Regulations include requiring a Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission carrier permit, as well as stores making local deliveries needing a local cartage permit. Whatever the reason, the booze business is booming (i.e. craft beer) and shows no signs of stopping.

Alex Edwards contributed to this article.

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