After four years of business growth and expansion, Knead Doughnuts completed its move into a larger commercial kitchen in February.
The new space, in a restored mill building on Cromwell Street in Providence, allowed room for growth in retail, as well as wholesale and event business.
And then the COVID-19 pandemic arrived, closing most coffee shops and canceling wedding receptions.
Within a few weeks, co-owner Adam Lastrina went from managing growth to managing a swift decline, including the loss of his wholesale and wedding business, and grappling with the question of whether to close the retail locations in a rapidly changing environment.
In the end, after a wave of state-ordered closures, Knead closed entirely for a few days and let the dust settle. When it became clear the state would allow restaurants to continue to serve takeout food only, Lastrina and his partners decided to open for retail service two days a week, on the weekends only, at a single location.
The dramatic scale-down of the retail business means he’s selling only two days out of seven, and out of one location, not three. He laid off all but five of his 34 employees. After reopening, he slowly brought back three bakers and two retail employees.
“Two days a week, Saturday and Sunday, is better than zero,” Lastrina said in a recent interview. “It keeps us relevant.”
While the business is still allowed to sell through takeout, that option didn’t really work for its downtown location, he said, because it is too narrow to safely separate patrons.
By the beginning of April, Knead doughnuts were being sold at its Wayland Square store on Elmgrove Avenue.
The model is for takeout only, with orders placed and paid online and picked up by customers who find their package on a table. The pickup times are staggered for safety during the pandemic. On a typical weekend, the company has about 200 orders, he said.
The downtown location, where Knead was established in 2016, is continuing to be used as a community kitchen by food startups, in a separate venture launched by the company. But with college students and office workers gone, as well as tourists and conventioneers, it just didn’t have enough business to justify keeping it open, he said.
“With the exception of what the governor deemed ‘essential workers,’ everyone else was working from home,” he said. “Driving downtown, today, it was a wasteland. There’s no one.”
Despite such uncertainty, Lastrina said they’re doing well on weekends and trying to envision a day when everything returns to normal. He knows it won’t happen overnight.
After the economic fallout, many people will be limiting their expenses, he noted.
Of the layoffs, he said it was difficult and upsetting. But he couldn’t see a way around it. Every restaurant in Rhode Island was in the same predicament. “It would be irresponsible of me to keep you on and give you zero hours, when you can at least collect unemployment for a couple of weeks,” he said.
When the economy is restarted and restaurants are allowed to reopen, Lastrina said he expects it will be a slow climb for many in his industry.
“The challenge a lot of these businesses will have is there is never going to be a case of a date, and a switch, and we’re open. It’s going to take a long time,” he said.
OWNERS: Adam Lastrina, Todd Mackey, Bryan Gibb
LOCATIONS: 55 Cromwell St., Providence; 135 Elmgrove Ave., Providenc
TYPE OF BUSINESS: Bakery
EMPLOYEES: Five (34 before the pandemic)
YEAR ESTABLISHED: 2016
ANNUAL SALES: WND
Mary MacDonald is a PBN staff writer. Contact her at Macdonald@PBN.com.
