DALTON, Mass. – The popular Shire Donuts is opening a second location in Dalton this spring.
Jeff and Heather King opened their donut shop in Adams over a year ago. Now they are expanding their operations to Berkshire County Center due to its popularity.
After observing that more than a few of their customers were coming from the south for their custom donuts, the Kings decided to bring them together. Their new store will open on Dalton Division Road in the spring.
“Since we opened in Adams, we’ve noticed we get a lot of traffic from Pittsfield, Dalton, Lanesborough and South County,” Jeff King said last week.
“I guess since we started doing online pre-orders you can tell where those orders are coming from so we started tracking them and we noticed we were getting a lot of orders from those regions, people were going to Adams for our donuts, so that’s what made us start thinking about it.”
The shop will be in Burgner’s old Farmer’s Market building in a space that had occupied Stacie’s Corner Cafe. Donut Connoisseurs originally aimed for a location in Pittsfield, but chose to be right on the town line.
“We had already started looking in Pittsfield and looked for other spaces, but we really liked this place, it’s a big part of town, there aren’t many other options in this part of the city for people looking for coffee or donuts, you have to drive more in Pittsfield,” King explained.
“So it’s a great space for us, the way she’s set it up, it won’t take a lot of effort in terms of renovations, we just have to add our touch, bring our equipment and go from there.”
King plans to open the Dalton store in March, taking into account possible equipment shortages in the supply chain.
Shire Donuts serves fresh cake donuts every morning with hundreds of topping combinations – even bacon and maple – and coffee to make the perfect pair. They also offer classics such as Glazed Donuts, Glazed Donuts, and a customer favorite: Cider Donuts.
“We make our own version of a cider donut, it’s an apple crisp, which is probably our most popular donut in that we actually make it the first weekend of every month,” said King.
“We don’t just do it in the fall, it was so popular that we decided to continue doing it year-round on the first weekend of every month, so people would come and get their cider donuts even in February.”
The new location will feature all creative topping options as well as expanded coffee offerings.
In October 2020, the couple opened their first location on Summer Street in Adams. The shop was enthusiastically received, serving 3,200 donuts in 15 hours.
In September 2021, Shire Donuts celebrated 125,000 donuts sold and was officially welcomed to the city with a groundbreaking ceremony. The Kings were praised for succeeding as a small business during the COVID-19 pandemic and were praised for helping to make the city a “destination”.
The company is inspired by a donut shop in the Outer Banks of North Carolina that is a family favorite. The Kings have always had godly conversations about opening such a store and when the pandemic hit, they decided to make their dream come true.
Daughters Lauren and Chloe King are part of the operation.
King sees the new location having similar hours of operation to the original: Fridays from 7 a.m. to 11 a.m., Saturdays and Sundays from 8 a.m. to noon.
Shire Donuts is also working on improving and expanding its website to make it more user-friendly for pre-orders in the Adams and Dalton locations.
Keywords: corporate changes, donuts,
