Special delivery.

• Author: Evangelista, Catherine
• Position: Mat-Su Milkman Co. home-delivers dairy and baked goods

Special Delivery

Carting dairy products and more door-to-door, Mat-Su Milkman has discovered new avenues of opportunity.

WORD OF MOUTH HAS some Anchorage area residents benefiting from a small business with a retroconcept more familiar to their grandparents - door-to-door deliveries from the milkman. And these days, milk isn't all he delivers.

The Mat-Su Milkman Co. is a home-delivery service specializing in doorstep deliveries of mainly Alaskan dairy and bakery products. Competitively priced with local grocery chain stores, the company offers more than 200 items, including chocolate milk, popsicles, eggs, gourmet coffee, bagels, smoked duck, salmon, soda pop and film developing.

Duane Bower and Ron Maclure started Mat-Su Milkman with a small truck and big dreams in June 1986. Tight budgeting preempted advertising, but innovation won recognition. The pair printed 25,000 flyers listing their grocery items and hand-delivered the flyers in various neighborhoods.

Bower and Maclure offered to bring what they call "mundane" items to the customers doorstep for a 50-cent delivery fee. The milkmen require a minimum grocery order of $5 before a customer can be added to the delivery route.

"People don't get much fun out of shopping for Tide or eggs - boring stuff - so they let us guys deliver it and they wake up to find it in a cooler on their doorstep," says Maclure. "In some cases, the customers have us come in while they're sleeping and put the stuff right in the fridge."

Freshness is the partners' key selling point. In the beginning, Bower and Maclure negotiated wholesale prices for goods from Sunrise Bakery and Matnuska Maid Dairy, so they could provide fresh local dairy and bakery goods to customers and pocket the markup. Since then, distributors such as Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Cafe Del Mundo, The Bagel Factory, Alaska Supreme Ice Cream and Europa Bakery have added to Mat-Su Milkman's line of products.

Becoming middlemen seemed like a good idea, says Maclure. He admits the idea for the service company came while watching a television program on a Denver, Colo., home-delivery service that had grown into a multimillion dollar business with a fleet of 110 trucks in just 10 years.

"At that time, the Mat-Su dairies were in the news for dumping excess milk that couldn't get shipped out in time," says Maclure. "So phone calls were made and we found that a home-delivery service would work."

Maclure says the idea also has helped to preserve domestic harmony in...