Sydney’s Dr Dough Donuts makes $12m selling doughnuts

The founder of a popular doughnut store has made millions off Sydney’s love of the sweet treat. Find out how she did it.

Bannister delivers 500 doughnut boxes across Sydney daily. Picture: Richard Dobson

Capitalising on Sydney’s love of doughnuts has brought in the dough for entrepreneur Kristy Bannister.

Bannister, who co-founded gifting company Dr Dough Donuts with her husband six years ago, has made over $12 million selling the humble and holey sweet treat.

Currently, the company deliver 500 boxes of doughnuts a day across Sydney. That number doubled over the Mother’s Day weekend.

Pictured at her office at Pyrmont in Sydney is Kristy Bannister. Kristy is the founder of gifting company Dr Dough Donuts. Picture: Richard Dobson

Last month they started selling into Victoria and later this year will expand also into Brisbane.

“Doughnuts are ageless and not gender specific,” Bannister said. “A 10-year-old likes them just as much a 100-year-old.”

While Covid negatively impacted many hospitality businesses it was the opposite for Bannister, whose business grew exponentially with people stuck at home.

“It changed our momentum,” she said. “We weren’t just delivering doughnuts, but little boxes of joy.”

Now these same doughnuts are being used to draw people back into the office.

“We have a lot of corporate clients ordering boxes to entice people back into the office,” she said.

“I’ve had people announce their engagement, pregnancy and resignation with our doughnuts.”

Bannister started work in the hospitality industry when she was just 15, as a crew trainer at McDonalds. It was that experience that led her to start her own cafe, which served her now famous doughnuts.

WHO HAS THE BEST DOUGHNUTS IN SYDNEY? THE MOUTH INVESTIGATES

Grumpy Donuts.

So it’s election season and we are now inundated with claims and counterclaims about the various directions, speeds, and manners by which this country is – or could soon be! – going to hell in a handbasket.

But without getting too political, this column would like to make one simple point: It is pretty much impossible for a nation to be doing too badly when someone can make $12 million in a doughnut business.

There are exceptions to this rule, of course.

Totalitarian China has apparently produced a chilli sauce billionaire (she’s the angry grandma lady staring out from the jar in the Asian food aisle) and New Jersey, arguably the worst state in the US, is reportedly home to a failing deli with a market value of $100 million.

Go figure.

But back to doughnuts.

As regular readers of this column know, The Mouth much prefers the small time owner-operated to the big and commercial. And while we are very happy for those who have made a motza in the “gifting doughnut” space we are much happier with those that are for actually eating. It turns out a lot of other people are, too.

Just think about how, a decade or so ago, Krispy Kreme doughnuts rose, crashed, and burned after everyone decided that once the novelty of picking a box up at the airport wore off they just weren’t very good. Small doughnut shops inspire fights around a conference table like arguments about the best slice in New York or the best pint of warm beer in London.

A selection of sweet treats at Camperdown’s Grumpy Donuts.

But for this column’s money it is hard to go past Grumpy Donuts, which sits on a very unglamourous strip of Pyrmont Bride Road in the inner west, next to a brewery that used to be a bit of a haunt for the area’s local MP before he launched himself at the Lodge.

Calling themselves “Sydney’s finest hand crafted doughnuts”, it is hard to disagree.

They do a million different flavours, but for this column’s money – and at $5.50 a throw they are a bit much for a cop’s salary – is the simple classic glazed doughnut, perfectly fried and puffy, with just the right amount of sugary crack.

It’s worth noting by the way that the shape and form of the doughnut has been contested for centuries, but if some local entrepreneur wishes to reprise the recipe for “balls of sweetened dough, fried in hog’s fat and called dough-nuts” mentioned by Washington Irving in 1804, this column will reconsider its verdict.

Originally published as Sydney’s Dr Dough Donuts makes $12m selling doughnuts