Doughnuts and Drive-Thru: Rhody Bakeries Rise to the Challenge
As many restaurants, grocery stores and other food providers have turned to curbside pickups or even home delivery, so too have many local bakeries, with variations among them for how much variety they can now offer, how the pickups work and the innovations they have come up with to keep their businesses running in some capacity.
Seven Stars Bakery, with its artisan breads and comfortable cafés, was a leader in instituting pickups at each of its four locations: Hope Street and Broadway, in Providence; Reservoir Avenue, Cranston; and Newman Avenue in Rumford. As of March 16, owners Bill and Tracy Daugherty closed all of their popular cafés but did a rapid reorganization and reopened with online ordering and curbside pickups at each of those locations.
“Our team came together really quickly,” says Bill Daugherty, with a note of pride in his voice. “Things changed so quickly, but we’ve stayed nimble. Everything is now prepaid and preordered online. Members of our team put the orders in car trunks—and we’ve all started wearing masks.”
“Even with walk-up or biking customers, there is zero contact,” he says. “That’s been hard, because Seven Stars has always been about community. We don’t even have wi-fi in our cafés, because we feel so strongly about that.”
At Provencal Bakery’s two locations, in Middletown and Newport, the Middletown café offers curbside pickup for soups, sandwiches, pastries and takeout meals; at the Newport bakery site, owner Brenda Sabbag has erected a tent, “like a mini farmers market,” in her words, with about 50 people stopping by every day.
She’s also selling their bread wholesale to Clements’ Marketplace, in Portsmouth, and to the app-driven home delivery service WhatsGood. She’s cut back on the types of bread her team is baking, and she has suspended the salads at the café to make operations run smoothly and safely.
“It’s challenging,” Brenda says. “You have to really think outside the box: How many [employees] do you have working? Who’s willing to work? It’s a very difficult time for small businesses.”
“We have to adjust for another month and try to keep our employees,” she says. “The hospitality industry is number one [for jobs and business] on Aquidneck Island, and everyone is hit hard. We just hope that by the summertime we can have some sense of normalcy.”
Adam Lastrina, of Knead Doughnuts in Providence, would certainly share that sentiment. Not only did his online orders for doughnuts shift from 10% of his business to 100% in just a few days, but in the middle of making those adjustments, Knead endured a fire at its Custom House Street location in Providence.
According to Adam, “Someone lit the dumpster on fire, it caught our window and quickly spread. Thankfully, one of the tenants on the second floor called 911 immediately. The fire was extinguished so quickly that we had no real fire damage inside and our sprinkler system did not go off. Another 10 to 15 minutes and we would be talking about a complete loss.”
Since Knead had moved all of its production to a new kitchen on Cromwell Street a month before the fire, there was no disruption to their baking. They have, however, lost most of their kitchen staff, so they have gone to a streamlined menu of seven to nine doughnut options, including the “classics” and the most popular.
“This is down from 24 varieties, back before the apocalypse,” Adam quips.
And even though curbside pickups are only on Saturdays and Sundays at Knead’s Elmgrove Avenue location, customer response has been overwhelming—200 orders in just three hours! And their immensely popular “Ding Dong Donuts” delivery program that allows customers to send donuts to loved ones is expanding due to the high demand.
LaSalle Bakery, a traditional bakery in Providence founded in 1932, has responded in its own way, too. “Customers call in orders, and we still let a couple people at a time into the store—there are big X’s to stand on. Or we can bring orders out to their cars,” says owner Michael Manni.
Like others, they have cut down on the variety of their breads, still making seven-grain and Italian, and they have slimmed their cookie trays to six to 10 cookies. Pickups are at the original Smith Street location, as well as the Admiral Street location.
“We’re trying to streamline as best as we can,” stresses Mike. “We don’t have the large mousse cake or cheesecake in the store, but if you order it ahead of time we will make one for you.”
LaSalle prepared many specialty items for Easter, and they will do the same for Mother’s Day, with offerings such as six-pack cupcakes for home-decorating or raw cookie dough or bake-at-home pizza.
All of the bakery owners expressed enormous gratitude for the loyalty of their customers, but at Seven Stars, the Daughertys took it one step further. They decided from the beginning of the curbside operation that they would donate any unsold breads to different Rhode Island charities, including the Cranston and Pawtucket senior centers.
“Although it may be hard to find positive things during this time,” says Bill Daugherty, “when our customers learned of our donations, they said, ‘How can we do more?’”
Their original goal was to donate at least 50 loaves of bread at the end of each day; it has grown to 100 loaves, and the charities include Amos House, Crossroads, We Share Hope, the Elisha Project and WBNA Neighbors Helping Neighbors.
“The love that has been shown from our customers—for our baking team and our bread-market pickup team and our donation program, has been remarkable,” Bill says, his voice heavy with emotion. “Everybody’s been incredibly gracious and respectful and appreciative.”
And, with rising optimism, he predicts: “We will all be back to the days of cinnamon rolls sometime soon!”
