Sprinkles Donut Shop
Sprinkles Donut Shop, headquartered in Georgetown Township, Ottawa County, Michigan, operates retail five stores in the surrounding area and is adding two new locations by the end of this year.
The business was founded in 2014 by the late Gary VanderStelt Snr, a professional baker who came out of retirement to start the business.
Sprinkles is now run by Gary VanderStelt Jnr, who was a software developer before he joined the company full time in 2018. Gary describes Sprinkles Donut Shop, with its one hundred employees, as a family business with an aggressive strategy for growth.
Explaining why he choose Cybake bakery management software, Gary says: “With Cybake, the biggest thing for me is that we can make decisions based on data. A lot of the decisions we’ve made in the past have been on gut or just opinions, such as ‘I think we were pretty busy last year.’ We were just making assumptions.
“When we started Sprinkles, I always told my dad that we were going to get to the point where we’re going to make decisions based from a dashboard or based off data. We’re getting there now.”
Facing supply chain issues, inflation and increases to the cost of labor, Gary explains some of his operational challenges.
He says: “It is harder to attract and recruit team members and it’s getting harder to keep our staff. Many businesses are paying more per hour or paying higher salaries. It just feels like it’s a very competitive market for labor. I think it has gotten better over the last couple of months, but we are always hiring. We have never had a point where we are fully staffed.
“That’s another reason Cybake is helpful, a lot of these manual processes we’ve had in the past took more time. So, from my point of view, from beginning to end, from the order being taken to the order delivered to the store, it has gotten more efficient.”
Change
When asked whether his staff backed the decision to roll out Cybake in his stores, Gary says: “Nobody has said, ‘Man, I wish we did it the old way.’ But there is that group that, right when we started talking about rolling this out, were really concerned. It’s funny because they’re all doing just fine.
“This is very normal; the group that doesn’t want to see change, they get nervous and a little stressed out. But I would say, all our team members are using Cybake without a lot of trouble.”
Sprinkles Donut Shop recently moved into frozen donut production to produce, package, and palletize frozen donuts to be shipped to grocery stores under a different brand. The move will see the retailer switch out their small kitchen for an 11,000 square foot facility with automated equipment, such as Rondo fry-lines, to produce donuts at a much faster rate.
Commenting on the development, Gary says: “I couldn’t imagine moving to increased capacity today with five stores without Cybake.”
Asked if he would recommend Cybake to other bakers, he said, “Yes. If I were to build something like this for Sprinkles, like a Sprinkles’ bakery software, it would be exactly like Cybake.”
Touching briefly on his software background, Gary continues: “When I quit my job and focused on Sprinkles, in my mind, I was going to build our very own ERP system and I kind of did that for a while. I just got too busy focusing on the operations inside Sprinkles to finish it. Everybody knew I wanted to write something on my own, and that’s why I was frustrated. Cybake was exactly like the system I was going to develop. I would definitely recommend it to other retail bakeries.”
If you would like to find out more or see a demo of how Cybake will cut admin, improve efficiency and improve sales in your bakery, contact us here, or use our LiveChat below.
Chris James is a communications specialist for Cybake and Cybake USA.
