Restaurant · Guide Updated August 2026

How a Donut Business Sells Out Every Drop (Frankie D's Donuts Story)

Makayla and her wife had no food industry background, no commercial kitchen, and no formal business plan when they started Frankie D’s Donuts. Within hours of opening their first pre-order, they sold out. Every drop since has done the same. Here is exactly how they pulled it off, and what you can steal for your own food business.

How Did Frankie D’s Donuts Start?

The origin is almost absurdly accidental. Makayla’s wife decided to learn baking in 2019. Her first project was not cookies or brownies but donuts, which is about as ambitious a starting point as you can pick. They loved the results. Their labradoodle Frankie went completely crazy for the smell of baking.

Months later, Makayla was on a phone call with a friend who worked in a small-town Manitoba kitchen. At the very end of the call, the friend almost forgot to mention it: “I accidentally started a donut business.” That sentence changed everything. Makayla ran to tell her wife. Canmore had nothing like it. The idea felt less like a plan and more like a calling.

They named the business Frankie D’s Donuts after their dog. The recipe came from that Manitoba friend, but the altitude in the Rocky Mountains broke it completely. They spent months tweaking the formula from scratch, learning as total amateurs. Eventually they landed something people raved about.

What Backgrounds Did They Come From?

Neither Makayla nor her wife came from food and beverage. Makayla started in real estate, then moved into an executive role running retreats, workshops, events, and online coaching programs. Her wife had run her own coaching and events business for 17 years. Together they had merged their businesses and were actively expanding into e-commerce.

A food business was never discussed. It was not on any plan. They were heading deeper into coaching and e-commerce when donuts showed up and changed the direction entirely.

That reversal matters. Most people in the food industry wish they were in the shiny online world. Makayla came from that shiny world and walked back toward food because nothing in e-commerce or coaching replicated the feeling of a customer telling you that your product gave them something to look forward to on a hard day.

How Did They Test the Product Before Launching?

They started in their condo kitchen and made 40 donuts at a time. They were not selling anything yet. They gave boxes to friends and friends of friends as taste tests, and then sent out surveys asking specific questions: What did you like? What did you not like? What would you prefer? How much would you pay? What occasion would you eat these for?

This is the step most first-time food operators skip. You fall in love with your own creation and look only for evidence that confirms it is great. Surveys force the market to give you honest answers. When I built my ice cream business, I collected more than 2,000 surveys before opening. Makayla applied the same discipline, and it showed up directly in her launch results.

She also built the Instagram account before she had a logo. She made a simple “D” on Canva, named the account “These Donuts,” wrote the handle on every box she handed out for taste testing, and asked people to share if they loved the product. By the time the first drop date arrived, she already had a warm audience who had been watching the story unfold.

How Did They Solve the Commercial Kitchen Problem?

Maxing out at 40 donuts in a home condo kitchen was never going to work as a real business. Donuts are time-intensive. If you are putting in 12 hours of production anyway, you may as well make 400 instead of 40. The economics only work at scale.

The problem was that Canmore had no commercial kitchen with a deep fryer available to rent. Most operators would stop here. Makayla talked about the challenge openly with friends. One friend, Maggie, knew the manager at Tavern 1883, a local restaurant. An email introduction later, Makayla was sitting with the chef, who said yes.

Tavern 1883 let them use the kitchen during off-hours, at night when the restaurant was not operating. Makayla and her wife had never worked in a commercial kitchen. They had to figure out how to use a commercial dishwasher. The chef showed them what equipment they could use and what they had to buy themselves. They got the permits, learned the space, and booked their first official donut drop.

The lesson is direct: put your problem out into the world. Tell people what you need. The kitchen did not appear because Makayla sat quietly hoping it would work out. It appeared because she said out loud that she needed a kitchen with a fryer and someone in her circle knew exactly who to call.

What Happened on the First Drop?

The first official donut day was August 20, 2020. Pre-orders opened on the Monday before a Friday pickup. Orders came in by email from Instagram followers. The drop sold out within hours.

For the first four to five months, all orders were taken by email. It worked, barely. Eventually the volume was too high and they built an online store. The email process was taking hours per drop.

Every single donut day since that first one has sold out.

Why Did She Actually Almost Quit?

The near-quit moments were not about doubting the product. They were about demand outpacing capacity and the emotional weight of telling people no.

Frankie D’s was selling out so fast that Makayla started to feel guilty. People who missed the drop would email in. Her wife eventually had to step in and ask Makayla to stop handling those emails personally because the disappointment was getting to her.

She responded by stopping marketing entirely for months. The logic made sense emotionally but it was the wrong move operationally. You do not solve a sellout problem by shrinking demand. You solve it by scaling production.

Once she understood that selling out is a brand asset, not a failure, she started marketing again. Now the plan is to hire, move to a bigger kitchen, and increase the number of drops per month. She was doing one to two drops monthly while juggling the coaching business simultaneously.

The 12-hour overnight shifts were brutal. In at 11 p.m., customers picking up at 11:30 the next morning. There were points during those long production nights where she thought about walking away. Then the customers arrived. Someone would share that they had been having a rough stretch and the donuts were the one thing they were looking forward to. That is a hard thing to quit.

How Does the Brand Mission Connect to Sales?

Frankie D’s is not positioned as just a donut shop. The brand is explicitly tied to mental health, community, and giving people small moments of joy when life gets hard. During the pandemic, when people in Canmore were quarantined and looking for a reason to leave the house, a Friday donut pickup became a ritual.

This is not marketing language. Makayla lives it. She talks about it because she believes it. That authenticity is exactly why the community shows up every drop. Customers who did not even like donuts became converts.

Authentic values are not a differentiator you add on top of your business. They are either the foundation or they are nothing. Operators who state a community mission because it sounds good but do not live it in their daily decisions get found out quickly. The ones who mean it build something customers feel loyal to.

The Bottom Line

Frankie D’s Donuts is proof that starting without industry experience is not the obstacle most people think it is. Rigorous customer testing, a scrappy solution to the kitchen problem, an Instagram presence built before the first sale, and a brand mission that was genuine from day one all compounded into a business that has never had an unsold drop. You do not need a perfect setup to start. You need real answers from real customers, the willingness to ask for help out loud, and values you actually live. Build on those three things and the sellouts take care of themselves.

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