United Craft's Point of View on Delivery Fees: How We Will Save Our Retailers Money!
June 5th, 2026
Dear Retail Partners,
On June 1st, our third-party delivery service Cold Haus Direct (CHD) communicated that delivery fees would apply to future beverage alcohol orders. The timing & roll out of this have been challenging given the rapid deployment of this policy change. While we did not institute this policy change, we do regret and apologize for its execution.
While delivery fees may appear as a cost increase, for United Craft, this will result in lower costs for you. I’m writing this to explain why.
This policy change is an improvement in transparency and flexibility on costing that will hopefully make all products more affordable in thanks to the changes by the Ford Government and LCBO. Why?
1. You have already been paying a delivery fee on our products – it was just not visible to you. And, you paid at least 35% more than you needed to. When we sell a ready to drink spirit product to the LCBO it is marked up +35% before it is resold to you.
2. Furthermore, the suppliers of LCBO supplied products do not pay delivery at all – you do – so this now puts all brands on the same playing field. Will these brands lower prices?
3. There was no way to offer lower delivery fees for larger orders. The wholesale price is the same for all customers regardless of order size.
4. You can opt to assign Cold Haus as your carrier for all LCBO supplied items. So United Craft’s order volume can help you even reduce delivery fees on LCBO orders. Ask us how!
This change now empowers us the supplier to remove the embedded and marked up delivery fees from our prices, lower our wholesale cost & offer cheaper delivery fees for volume orders.
At United Craft, we will be lowering our wholesale prices to their lowest ever.
This has to be done in accordance with the LCBO Pricing schedule. The next opportunity for us to do so is June 22nd with an LCBO Wholesale Effective Date of August 17th. We will be using our voice to get this date accelerated and hope you will join us.
Should you believe me? Yes – because we’ve done it before and will do it again. Prior to April 1st the Ford Government & LCBO implemented tax and mark up reductions on alcohol. We passed those savings along on our core products at more than 2.5X the rate as the entire RTD category. Integrity is often described as doing the right thing even when no one is looking. We wanted to invest those savings in you. Others passed along savings as well but some did not and worse some suppliers even took prices up!
We have the pricing data* and are happy to review it with you so you can better understand who you can count on to build joint value – and who is paying lip service to true partnership.
We will continue to serve you as best we can and hope that this letter provides clarity and reassurance to you that our products will continue to remain affordable and demonstrate our sincere interest in creating even more value together. Thank you for your business & support.
Ian Macdonald
President, United Craft
*Please reach out to us at orders@unitedcraft.ca to review the pricing data. All figures are from publicly available information any consumer could have obtained on their own and are in accordance with all pricing and competition act regulations.