Florida runs a three tier system. Manufacturers sell to distributors, distributors sell to licensed vendors, and a restaurant or bar is a vendor. The part that matters when you are shortlisting is that the middle tier is a matter of public record: the Department of Business and Professional Regulation publishes every licensee, and we read the September 2026 extract rather than taking any company's word for what it is.
Two license classes can sell you wine. KLD covers beer, wine and liquor, and JDBW covers beer and wine with no spirits at all. Miami-Dade holds 78 KLD licenses, 77 of them active, out of 294 in the whole state. That is more than Broward with 44 and Orange with 29 put together, which is the clearest single measure of how much of Florida's drinks trade sits in this county.
Not one of the thirty companies below publishes its license number on its own website. The state publishes it and the trade does not, so we put it on the card. If you want to check a supplier yourself before you open an account, the license number is the thing to check, and it is the one detail a website will never give you.
