Fife-based Fisher and Donaldson has had a whirlwind of a year after the coronavirus outbreak, with many of their successes involving fudge doughnuts in some shape or form.
The family-run business, whose flagship store is based in Cupar, found they had to close their shops for the first time in the business’s 101-year history due to the pandemic.
Marketing manager Chloe Milne said that they’ve managed to get through the 12 months in lockdown thanks to their loyal customers and the company’s hardworking staff.
She said: “Some of the highlights over the past year have been our staff adapting and working extremely hard under immense pressure. They, and our loyal customers, are what has got us through the most difficult period in our 101-year history.
Some of the successes for Fisher and Donaldson during difficult period for almost every business were: “Launching an online shop and doing nearly 14,000 home deliveries to date, as well as building and opening our outdoor garden cafe in Cupar and seeing how successful and well-appreciated that was by our local community.”
Reflecting back over the year, Chloe has highlighted some of the business’s biggest changes during the Covid-19 pandemic, month-by-month since March 2020.
March 2020: Launching an online shop and home deliveries
Having to close their stores as the world started going into lockdown in March, Chloe and her team found they were able to move everything online and maximise on home deliveries.
She said: “We came up with the idea very quickly into lockdown. Obviously, the world was getting stranger and stranger and we were able to see at some point that there would come a tipping point and we would potentially not be able to open our shops.
“It took me two days to build an online shop and go live with it. The interest in that far exceeded anything that we could have ever imagined. I think we launched it actually a few days before we then made the decision to shut our shops up.
“That was a very strange month – it was the first time in 100 years we’ve ever not opened our shops. That was a very, very difficult day when we did that, but the online shop really kept us going because, overnight, we’d shut seven shops.
“But then we got to the point where we were doing hundreds of home deliveries a day. Our customers just transferred to online and a lot of people really appreciated it because they definitely did not want to go into a supermarket and you couldn’t get deliveries from supermarkets either.
“All of our energy shifted on to packing orders and delivering them around the local communities. And then we also had some of our wholesale customers still open – as we have small in-store counters in some smaller supermarkets, and their orders just went through the roof because people were panic buying.”
April 2020: Selling more than 5,000 bags of flour online
During the month when panic buying was the norm and the supermarket shelves were empty of essentials like flour and bread, Fisher and Donaldson found themselves in a position where they couldn’t sell flour fast enough to meet demand.
Chloe said: “It was absolutely nuts! It never happened again in subsequent lockdowns but you couldn’t buy flour or yeast in the shops anywhere. We had a lot of it in our warehouse. That was another thing we thought of overnight, that we should maybe put some into big bags of flour that we get from Kirkcaldy into smaller bags and sell them.
“So we did that and a few of the supermarkets we supply were ordering hundreds at a time. Then we put them on our online shop and they were popular there too.
“I don’t know why it was – everyone had just gone home from their work and maybe thought ‘I’m going to try and make my own bread now’ or something. It was a bit apocalyptic!
“A few of our staff spent all day, every day for that month just packing flour.
“It wasn’t something we sold anyway but we’ve now got little sections in most of our shops where we have flour and I think it’s something we’ll probably continue with.
May 2020: Reopening the flagship store
Having closed the main branch of Fisher and Donaldson in Cupar for the first time in more than 100 years, Chloe and her team finally got the news they were hoping for and quietly opened their doors again to the local community.
She added: “When we decided to reopen in May, we knew we could reopen safely, but we didn’t want to attract a lot of customers at once. So we basically opened quietly. It’s a strange situation as we normally have this large glazed cafe area that we obviously couldn’t use, so we now use that as socially distanced office space because we didn’t have enough room to distance our office staff.
“But we could see lots of people trying to pop in to buy bread and stuff when we weren’t open. Since we bake everything here we decided just to open with a small counter and allow only one customer in at a time.
“We just opened to test the waters initially, because under the guidance we were allowed to be open. We’d put up lots of screens and signage and hand sanitising stations and all that, then opened the doors to see how it went.
“I think because the supermarkets were quite busy at that time, people appreciated being able to come in when they were the only customer at the time and get their essentials.
June 2020: Launched afternoon teas at home
Having afternoon teas at home was a huge trend in 2020 and Fisher and Donaldson were one of the first to launch their own enterprise.
Chloe continued: “I think people were looking for ways to cheer themselves up at this point. So we decided to try and put together an afternoon tea that we could deliver to people who just wanted to treat themselves or had a birthday and couldn’t go anywhere.
“We launched the afternoon teas in June and haven’t stopped doing it. It’s proved really popular and I think we’ll be looking to continue that in some way or shape or form in our shops in future.
“We have a standard one that’s an afternoon tea for two and it includes various mini cream cakes, with scones etc. Then we’ve now started, depending on what the occasion is, making an extra special version. We’ve had a Mother’s Day one, which included chocolates and some daffodils, and now we’ve got an Easter one with some Easter eggs and simnel cake hot cross buns.”
July 2020: Created an ice cream fudge doughnut
One of the bakery’s newest creations, the ice cream version of their hit fudge doughnut, was a product of the pandemic when Chloe wanted something to eat in the height of summer that didn’t involve the usual custard.
“This was a huge hit. We sort of invented it in July, although we waited until we opened our garden cafe, which took longer than we thought, to launch them.
“It was just so hot in July and I don’t actually eat fudge doughnuts as I’m not a custard fan. So I decided that I wanted to try fudge doughnut but with ice cream in the middle. We tested it out in July, and then when our garden cafe opened in September, we started selling them then.
“Hopefully in summer 2021 we will be able to roll them out into our shops to sell there as well, if we can find a way to do that. I think this is also something we will look to bring out each summer.”
August and September 2020: Started building and opened our garden cafe
With outdoor areas such as beer gardens and cafes able to open towards the end of the summer, the business decided to build and open a garden cafe in the field next door to the bakery which would allow their customers to continue enjoy their favourite baked goods.
Chloe said: “We spent the whole of August building our garden cafe, before opening it in September. It basically started as a small idea where we thought we should try and sell coffee out in the field we weren’t using beside our flagship store.
“It was a huge-scale building project and it’s now a permanent feature here. We’ve got this big marquee and a big servery unit, so you can order everything out in the garden cafe as you would in one of our normal stores.
“It probably won’t be until the end of April when we can open that up again. We couldn’t do everything we wanted because of Covid rules, but once the world is back to normal we’ve got loads of plans like barbecues, pizza nights and kids’ activities.”
October – December 2020
Chloe continued: “At the end of the year there wasn’t anything in particular that happened here, though our shops had reopened and we were focusing a lot on our garden cafe.
“We did a few little things like scavenger hunts at Halloween round the gardens and little activities like that that allowed families to come in their own parties and sit at their own tables to have a little bit of ‘normal fun’.
“In November and December we also had a couple of little pop-up stalls for which we invited local producers to sell stuff because they obviously hadn’t many sales over the summer months.
“We were really just plodding along until the end of the year when the cafes all shut again.”
2021
Entering 2021, the whole of Scotland was on a nationwide lockdown, with outdoor areas still unable to open and only takeaways from food and drink businesses allowed.
Starting off the year, Fisher and Donaldson maximised on their giant fudge doughnut birthday cakes, which bakery staff are still making lots of every day.
Chloe says: “My brother reckons we’ve been making giant fudge doughnuts for at least 20 years, but it’s the kind of thing that was just a little photo in our birthday cake brochure that we made. Back then we were never really that online savvy and people didn’t really know that we did it.
“So I ordered one and put a nice photo of it on Facebook and it became our most popular Facebook post of all time back in January.
“Then when I came into work the next day, everyone was just looking at me like ‘what did you do?’. They were used to making maybe one or two a week but they suddenly had 50 to make for the next day. And since then they haven’t really stopped as the orders are still coming in.
“I think if we had done that in normal times it still would’ve been popular, but because people can’t see each other on their birthdays or have a party, they seem to be indulging a bit more in things like buying a nice cake they maybe wouldn’t usually buy.”
But with a sense of normality on the horizon and many hospitality businesses looking to open up again from April 26, the team is looking forward to the future.
Chloe said: “In the past couple of months, we launched a strawberry tower for Mother’s Day and only just announced a limited edition fudge doughnut Easter Egg. But we’re mostly looking forward to getting our stores back open again and welcoming back our customers.”