A Fresh Challenge
After being made redudant from his job with food giant Aryzta, Brian O’Casey used his industry experience to set up Offbeat Donut Co., writes
Brian O’Casey was 50 years old when his employer Aryzta, a global player in baking bread and cake products, offered him redundancy. A 25-year veteran in the industry, with specialist experience in marketing, branding and product development of baked goods, O’Casey likens his initial reaction to a “mid-life crisis”.
The DCU graduate, who was schooled at Portmarnock Community School, soon realised the exit was a blessing. O’Casey had always harboured aspirations to own his own business and he saw a gap in the market for patisserie outlets, common on the continent but not so much in Ireland and the UK. However, the O’Casey patisserie would have a single product – donuts, albeit in multiple flavours and varieties.
Alongside his wife Sandra, O’Casey purchased a garden shed and worked there with a pastry chef to develop donut recipes that could be cooked on premises, in the same way as Cuisine de France bread baked in the shop was the launchpad for Aryzta’s success.
After working with Green Isle and Pierre’s Foodservice after college, O’Casey joined Cuisine the France in 2002, and before he left Aryzta in 2015, he oversaw developing new consumer brand concepts for the company’s activity in Europe. O’Casey was well acquainted with innovation, his focus had crystallised on the circular pastries, and Offbeat Donuts commenced trading May 2016.
The venture has been a moneyspinner from the start, and last year the couple decided to bring outside investors into the business. Having proved the Offbeat concept, O’Casey and his wife want to see the brand succeed in the UK and perhaps further afield too – just like Cuisine de France/ Aryzta in the old days.
The husband-and-wife team work in tandem, with Sandra no stranger to the business world. Alongside her brother Tom Murphy, she was involved in the establishment of Boards.ie in 1998. She was area manager in Ireland for shoe repair firm Mister Minit, before stepping back to raise the O’Casey children.
From the outset, Sandra O’Casey managed the communication and marketing side of the business, as well as the finances, and she is a 25% shareholder in the operating company, Maximus SOS Ltd.
Husband Brian has a similar stake in the company, though it’s just below 25%. According to the company’s September 2022 annual return, the majority shareholding in Offbeat Donuts now vests with BiaVest Holdings, an Isle of Manregistered investment vehicle for coffee entrepreneur David McKernan, and Hilliard Lombard, a senior executive with Aryzta from 2008 to 2015. Also involved in BiaVest is Noel Smith, who
Brian O’Casey went into making donuts after being made redundant
started the Fresh grocery chain and who gave Offbeat its first break.
Smith had a retail space near Dublin’s Pearse Street train station that hadn’t worked out for another tenant, and it was geared for food production. “It just fell into my lap,” O’Casey recalls. “Noel was prepared to be flexible with the lease, so I didn’t have to sign long-term, and anything I wanted to keep in the building wasn’t a problem.”
Using capital from the redundancy package, the O’Caseys worked on the layout of the store, figuring out where equipment would fit in and how the store would look. Each Offbeat Donuts store is fitted with its own production kitchen so the donuts can be baked fresh every morning.
At the beginning of Offbeat Donuts, Brian O’Casey’s priority was ensuring the artisan bakery was commercially viable. “Bakeries are a labour-intensive business, and they have a lot of variables, so you have to do a lot of volume,” O’Casey explains. “When I looked around Europe at the time, there was a trend where donuts were becoming more popular. They can be produced in the quantities required to pay the bills.”
According to filed accounts, O’Casey funded the establishment of Offbeat Donuts with a €234,000 loan to the company. The operating company booked a net profit of €60,000 in 2016 and the venture was on its way.
Offbeat added Dublin city centre outlets in George’s Quay (December 2016) Jervis Street (November 2017), Heuston Station (November 2018) and Westmoreland Street (August 2019).
The donut retailer also reached into the suburbs with outlets in Dundrum Town Centre (June 2017) and The Square in Tallaght (November 2018). Offbeat also has two franchise outlets in Fresh’s stores at Grand Canal Square and Smithfield.
The Maximus SOS accounts disclose bountiful trading through 2017. As headcount expanded from 23 to 72 people, there was €309,000 investment in premises fit out, €110,000 repayment of the director’s loan account, directors’ pension payment of €359,000, and a year-end net profit of €246,000.
The proliferation of stores in office-reliant central locations and transport hubs became an issue when Covid reared its head in 2020. Plans for a Dublin Airport and Belfast franchise were scrapped, while the founders grappled with the government’s lockdown diktats.
Pre-pandemic, Offbeat was set up for corporate deliveries, and the Covid crisis forced its hand into home deliveries too, providing next-day deliveries from stores or same-day delivery through Deliveroo and Just Eat. It was a decision that “paid a good chunk of the bills and started to get things going again,” says O’Casey, but also highlighted the growing importance of suburban locations.
“The suburbs were doing much better. The city centre was very difficult, the stores that were targeted at office workers took a hammering. They didn’t and still haven’t recovered in terms of turnover.”
When an opportunity presented itself during the pandemic, it was too good to refuse. Blanchardstown Shopping Centre had an available store site in December 2020, beside Dunnes Stores, and it was its proximity to a rival that was also important.
“We wanted to open up beside Krispy Kreme because they’d been opening up beside all of our stores!” laughs O’Casey. “They’ve been very actively trying to squeeze us out of the market, which hasn’t happened, and we’re very happy to compete with them here, in the UK or anywhere else.”
The George’s Quay branch, Offbeat Donut’s second store, was a Covid casualty, while the company’s Prague franchise, its first international offshoot, didn’t survive the pandemic either. However, the company fared well in the first year of the pandemic, booking a net profit of €227,000 in 2020 after a €196,000 depreciation charge, as the staff complement was halved to 55 people.
By the end of 2020, the company’s fixtures and fitting outlay at its leased premises amounted to €1.6m. Total liabilities were €1.1m, including €390,000 bank debt, and though the company had €710,000 cash at year-end, the O’Caseys decided