As the largest wine and spirits wholesaler in the country, Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits has been immersed in a years-long transformation of its digital operations that’s designed to equip its sales team, retailers, and even supplier partners with worldclass capabilities and insights. Backed by what the Miami-and Dallas-based company calls a sizeable investment, the digital transformation seeks to streamline interactions between the distributor, its hundreds of suppliers, and its thousands of retail customers, as well as provide proprietary insights to its partners, all while retaining the “people-first” mission upon which the company was founded more than a century ago.
Part of a major capital and resource investment initiative announced a year ago, the new product and platform operating model is helping the distributor to build, design, scale, and operate best-in-class digital solutions. While Southern Glazer’s, which services more than 250,000 on- and off-premise accounts in 47 states, declines to reveal the size of the investment, company officials say that it’s comprehensive. “We expect these investments to pay dividends in both the near and long term and are taking bold steps to set ourselves up for success,” said CEO Wayne Chaplin, when announcing the overall outlay in 2024. “We’re making these investments now despite soft market conditions to position us for when the environment bounces back.”
Southern Glazer’s digital transformation is enhancing both its own internal platforms as well as external portals via which it interacts with its customers. “We’ve been figuring out how to get everything connected, making things more user focused and customer centric, building proprietary and internal systems, and focusing on speed of use and our in-house team,” explains chief digital officer Alan Wizeman. But ultimately, the company is working to drive a similar focus, speed, and transformation throughout its expanded network. “Because we have the largest share in the marketplace, we have the unique opportunity to help our customers understand their customers better, including online behavior, offline behavior, and what’s happening on- and off-premise.”
Chief growth officer David Chaplin notes that the company’s renewed commitment to digital excellence is focused on the long term. “It’s not just a project, but a business unit of our company that we’ll continue to improve upon. It’s a year-over-year investment that’s beginning
Deep Roots
With roots that date back to the Glazer family’s entry into the beverage business in 1909, Southern Glazer’s is the No. 1 distributor of wine and spirits in the U.S., with estimated sales revenue of $25.2 billion this year, according to Market Watch sister publication Impact newsletter. The Glazers moved into beer distribution with the repeal of Prohibition in 1933. Southern Wine & Spirits of America, meanwhile, was co-founded in 1968 by Harvey Chaplin, a spirits industry veteran. For the next 50 years both companies greatly expanded their operations and clout in markets around the country, with succeeding generations of family members helping to lead the way. In 2016, the companies merged, forming Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits. Expansion continues today as witnessed by the company’s acquisition of substantially all of the assets of New England’s Horizon Beverage Group last year.
In recent years, Southern Glazer’s has been focused on its “North Star” transformation, including the modernization and standardization of technology to meet its changing needs, as well as those of its customers and suppliers. These investments “ladder up to our corporate 2030 vision to be the most valuable selling and logistics provider in the hospitality industry,” David Chaplin says. David—who joined Southern ten years ago—is now tasked with “leading and unifying both our digital and IT groups in order to streamline our technology priorities to maximize our value,” he shares. Some 350 employees now comprise the digital team.
While it’s still early days, Southern Glazer’s executives say progress is already impressive. Test market results show “a much deeper participation and collaboration to solve problems and problems getting solved much faster,” Wizeman says. The use of greater automation for some sales functions, for example, allows sales team members “to do what they do best—spend time with customers and build relationships,” he notes. Members of his team work to “understand the challenges and opportunities” of employees systemwide and even participate in functions like “ride alongs” with sales personnel and drivers. For the company’s supplier and retailer colleagues, the initiative is building out “a companion strategy in the palm of their hands that provides insights, features, and capabilities that expand the potential for what we do for their business,” Wizeman says. Indeed, Chaplin adds that rather than as a distributor, in this capacity,
Early Success
Initiative inroads with its retailer partners to date vary by account type. Wizeman explains that the wholesaler classifies its customers into three groups: national accounts and big chains; small chains and big independents; and independents. For its largest accounts, “we’ve made a lot of our planning and how we interface with their systems a lot easier to save time, increase accuracy of order, and get a better understanding of their needs,” Wizeman says, as well as providing insights on forecasting and trends, all with a goal of attaining category captaincy. Already, the company has achieved captaincy with Walmart and Target, among others, Wizeman notes. For the second tier of retailers, Southern Glazer’s has started testing how to bring technology to the accounts “to help them get the same insights that a national account could get,” he says, focusing on functions including ordering, delivery, and inventory. And with the smaller accounts, because technology status varies widely, the company is working to help those retailers “understand their businesses better” and provide them with unique tools to improve sales. He points to “some great tests with marketing materials” that drove traffic and improved inventory forecasting.
Southern Glazer’s Proof B2B ecommerce platform is also being upgraded. Launched six years ago, Proof already accounts for nearly $4 billion in sales, Chaplin says, and is aligned with notable purveyors including Walmart.com, Totalwine.com, and Gopuff.com. Last year, a search function was added, and this year, Proof recommendations—which leverages AI to provide customers “a better understanding of assortment, velocity, and timing to ensure they stay in stock”—will launch, he notes. The upgrades are resulting in “more of a B2C experience and making it easier to do business with Southern Glazer’s,” Chaplin says. “We’ve come a long way but we believe there’s a lot of runway ahead of us.” Meanwhile Proof Sales, the company’s customer relationship management platform, has also received a deep investment.
Supplier partners additionally stand to benefit from the distributor’s ramped up digital commitment. Chaplin and Wizeman say the company can now work in “real time” with its vendors. Such data exchanges “have improved our co-development and collaboration and have allowed us to leverage our data and their data to arm our sales consultants,” Chaplin explains.
Dream Team
Southern Glazer’s is making a significant investment in talent to ensure the digital transformation reaches and exceeds its mission. Wizeman, who joined the company in 2023, has had a storied career in e-commerce and entrepreneurship, with previous roles at Lululemon and Target. Chaplin says the team that Wizeman has assembled represents a “mix of industry experience, Southern Glazer’s experience, and external best-in-class technology and digital experience.”
A new Enterprise Data Center of Excellence has been formed that leverages and consolidates much of the company’s internal technologies. “It allows us to take advantage of new technologies, develop, and understand insights,” explains Wizeman, often utilizing AI-powered technology. As an example, he says Southern Glazer’s has been able to reduce national accounts forecasting and planning time from thousands of hours of manual work to minutes, “helping our teams process information, make better recommendations, and advance relationships.” The data center, he continues, is “hyper focused in ensuring that the data we need can be in the hands of every Southern employee so that everyone can be an analyst.”
Despite all the technical and digital advances, Southern Glazer’s insists that the moves will only improve, not diminish, its relationships and interactions with retailers and suppliers. “The most amazing thing Southern Glazer’s has is its relationships in the market and deep history with its suppliers,” says Chaplin. “While ‘digital’ often has an adversarial connotation to staff and customers, we’re flipping that conversation. A lot of what we’re doing, including enhancements to Proof, is to show that these tools can strengthen relationships. In this industry, people want face-to-face interactions. The more we can support that, the deeper we can connect with our customers.” Southern Glazer’s is “always going to be a people-first business,” he continues. “Part of our DNA is that we’re in the hospitality business.”
While the company has already made a lot of strides, Chaplin says Southern Glazer’s is eyeing a continual streamlining of its digital efforts. “We want to make doing business with Southern Glazer’s as seamless and easy as possible while simultaneously growing our retail partners’ business in a challenging market. If we accomplish that, we’ll ultimately help our suppliers in the market. We have the team members to do it. That’s our recipe for success.”