Donut Drive-In is a St. Louis, MO institution that has made some of the best doughnuts in the city for decades. In high school, I passed by every morning and occasionally dropped in for a famous apple fritter. In 2020, a friend and former high school classmate, Kevin McKernan, jumped on the opportunity to purchase Donut Drive-In. Hearing the news evoked a bit of nostalgia and curiosity in me — what was the plan for this little shop in south St. Louis city?
Soon after purchase, the COVID-19 pandemic forced the new owners to temporarily close Donut Drive-In. They made the best of the situation by implementing important changes that laid the groundwork for future expansion and success. Wild Operation was lucky enough to help implement some of those changes and has continued to evolve them over the last several years.
Online ordering with a twist
Online ordering became a requirement for restaurants during the pandemic. The catch for Donut Drive-In was that doughnuts are typically baked the night before. There was no guarantee a doughnut would be available if a same-day pickup order was placed, and managing available inventory each day wasn’t realistic.
Donut Drive-In needed online pre-ordering. They needed to collect orders and pickup dates at least one day ahead of time and to convey that requirement to customers. This would allow bakers to accurately prepare for the next day.
To begin solving this problem, an e-commerce solution called Smart Online Order for the Clover point of sale system was chosen, along with its accompanying WordPress plugin. This solution allows for scheduled pickups and would work for many restaurants, but does not completely solve Donut Drive-In’s unique situation.
Customized pickup options at checkout
To create the online pre-ordering system that Donut Drive-In needed, there were a few special requirements:
- no same-day pickups
- pickups for the following day must be disabled before baking starts — not at the end of business hours
- available pickup dates and times may change due to holidays or other circumstances
- printed receipts for online orders must include extra information, such as the total number of items
Using a self-hosted WordPress solution gave us the flexibility to extend Smart Online Order with a custom-built plugin. With our solution, next-day pickup options are removed from checkout every day at a specified cut-off time. Same-day pickups are never available. Receipt information is modified before it’s sent to the POS and printed at the shop.
Checkout functions are all controlled through a user-friendly dashboard and modifiable by a site admin as needed.
A recipe for success with bakers’ reports
Donut Drive-In makes hundreds of doughnuts, if not thousands, for online pre-orders and catering orders every day. Asking employees to break down every printed receipt to determine the pickup day, and then determine what to bake for the next day, would be an error-prone process. Printed receipts aren’t scalable on their own.
Enter the bakers’ report: A daily email summary containing everything that needs to be baked for tomorrow.
Each day a custom-built summary system compiles all of the data needed for the next day’s pickups and deliveries. The data for tomorrow’s pickups is pulled from either the WordPress site or directly from the POS using the Clover API. Pre-orders placed offline are also factored in and included in the same summary.
The result is a report that includes the total number of doughnuts broken down by type (e.g., “Long Johns”), and by individual doughnuts (e.g., “Chocolate Long Johns”). The summary rounds out with all scheduled pickup times for the following day.
Bakers’ reports are flexible enough to add additional emails, change delivery times, and change content through a simple WordPress interface.
This system is intended to help employees, but accurate totals also cut down on waste and help ensure customer orders are accurate.
Expanding to a new location
In 2024, Donut Drive-In opened a new location in Brentwood, MO. The Donut Drive-Up location is a small drive-up spot, perfect for pickups.
All of the previously used solutions were built to be customizable and scalable, so the expansion was possible with minimal updates or changes. WordPress Multisite was implemented to allow orders to be processed on a separate Clover POS system but still compiled into the same bakers’ report.
Technical solutions to improve business processes
Donut Drive-In’s process challenges were not insurmountable, but they were unique to their business. Wild Operation loves collaborating with small businesses to identify and solve internal and customer-facing problems.
If you think we can help, don’t hesitate to contact us.