Nectarine fritter (photo: Doughboys Donuts).
By Megan Cole
The blur of streetlights move through the night outside a quiet diner. This diner is the epitome of what a diner should be: Bad coffee that needs cream and sugar, club sandwiches, salty fries, homemade pies in a case and a stack of glistening glazed doughnuts.
The classic glazed doughnut is hardly what you’d think as being the foundation of a food trend, but in the last few years the doughnut has found itself in the spotlight (even earning itself a Food Network show), much the way the cupcake had years before.
Like with fashion, music, design and art, trends ebb and flow with the response of us, their customers. Last summer, as doughnuts were carving out a market in virtually every North American city, they began to appear in Victoria, BC in a similar way.
At the heart of every good idea is a balance of passion and business sense, and owner of Doughboys Donuts, Noah Warder, and his former business partner, Luke Roberts, were one of the first on the scene for gourmet doughnuts in Victoria.
The pair began by selling what they consider to be just good, quality doughnuts, not gourmet, at a farmers market. They were producing them in the early morning before the market in restaurant kitchens they were renting out, but with available kitchen space a constant struggle, Doughboys turned their focus away from the farmers market and towards the pursuit of a bricks-and-mortar location.
“There has been less hype around the doughnut this summer,” says Warder. “There are no cronuts or other crazy doughnut hybrids being featured in the media. ‘Gourmet,’ or what I refer to as good quality, or real doughnuts, have become a norm in many people’s minds. Real doughnuts are in almost every major city in Canada and the US. We are just behind the curve in Victoria for this particular type of food.”
Noah Warder, owner of Doughboys Donuts (photo: thelifenostalgic.com).
When Doughboys began a year ago, the only other “gourmet” doughnuts on the market in Victoria were Yonni’s Doughnuts, made in-house and sold by Discovery Coffee, and two weeks after Doughboys opened, up popped Mortis Cycle Donuts (it has since closed with the owners moving to Canada’s East Coast.)
Warder was never concerned about an over-saturation of the market, like what was seen with other food trends such as cupcakes.
“It doesn’t make me nervous because I don’t think doughnuts are a trend,” he says. “I suspected they weren’t and really feel we’ve confirmed this. Doughnuts are something people use to make at home, and are something everyone used to eat, and now people don’t know how to make them anymore and they don’t know where to get them either.”
Unlike Warder, Jordan Cash, proprietor of the acclaimed Vancouver, BC Cartems Donuterie, had some concerns about what the growing trendiness of doughnuts could mean for business.
Cash opened Cartems over two years ago based on an idea that came to him in a dream. “It was very vivid and in the dream I saw the name Cartems, which has absolutely no meaning at all, but I woke up and thought it was vivid and wrote it down, and just stuck it on the back burner. It wasn’t something I was going to do.”
Cartems has since earned the title as “Vancouver’s Best Doughnuts,” and Cash continues to maintain the individuality of his product.
“If doughnuts go the way of the cupcake it could take away some of the uniqueness of it,” he says. “I certainly hope it doesn’t and it’s funny because there was this show on the Food Network called Donut Showdown and we were on it, but it did make me feel like we were in that same cupcake kind of space, as far as the show went.”
Gourmet doughnuts being made the old fashioned way (photo: Doughboys Donuts).
While Cash may be worried his business could become like another cupcake shop, he believes the word trend implies there is an end point.
“The way I see it, the difference between cupcakes and doughnuts is North Americans never stopped eating doughnuts, whereas people’s consumption of cupcakes on a daily basis, or just in general, was lower,” he says.
The increased consumption of cupcakes, whether or not it was based on a trend, definitely benefited the Cupcakes by Heather and Lori empire.
When Heather White and her business partner, Lori Joyce, started their business in 2002 after being inspired by the famous Magnolia bakery in New York, White had no idea cupcakes would turn into a food trend.
“I just thought it was a great concept and something that was untouched,” she says. “We were the first in North America to open a cupcake-only bakery. We wanted to be just about cupcakes. We now do cupcakes, cakes and minis, but our brand is about the cupcakes.”
Even though White thought their cupcake brand was selling to an untapped market, she says cupcakes as a food trend has come up for the last 12 years since they’ve been in business and, like Cash and Warder, White believes her customers have a nostalgic connection to cupcakes.
“We were never worried people wouldn’t want a cupcake anymore,” she says. “They’ve become a staple in people’s households now. Instead of getting a cake if you’re going to an event, or if you’re going to a party, people bring cupcakes instead of cutting into a big slab cake. With cupcakes you have variety for the different people at the event.”
It’s hard to know which baking trend will outlast the other, and if another is going to come in and knock them both out of the running, but with both doughnut and cupcake enthusiasts putting their passion into good products, they are likely to always have customers coming back for more.
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