It was spring in Berlin and a young couple, Jessica Jeworutzki and Bram van Montfort, were about to open a brand new business together, Brammibal’s – the first all-vegan donut shop in Europe. Right before opening day, they discovered that someone had filled the keyhole to their front door with glue. The last of their cash, intended for supplies to make donuts for the launch, had to be spent on getting the door fixed. It was a crucial moment when family and friends came together to help them out, to help the business take off – which it did immediately. “Otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to continue,” van Montfort told me.
Brammibal’s opened a third premises two weeks ago, just two and a half years after that fateful opening, taking over from a Starbucks in a very busy part of Berlin at Potsdamer Platz. The new location is also less than two hundred and fifty metres away from a Dunkin’ (Donuts). But van Montfort and Jeworutzki are not phased. Two operators of the Dunkin’ franchise in Germany filed for bankruptcy last year, affecting thirty two Dunkin’ branches in Berlin and nearby Leipzig. Unprofitable recently opened branches and the introduction of the minimum wage were blamed, a spokesman told a German daily newspaper.
“We care more about quality,” Jeworutzki told me, “We don’t use preservatives in our dough and make everything fresh by hand every day. We strive for authenticity and transparency in our branding and social media and communicate what we stand for. Obviously we also care about veganism and sustainability and are very upfront about it.”
Brammibal’s currently donate approximately two thousand euros per month to charity, based off sales of their ‘charity donut’. Each month a new donut is dedicated to a new charity, selling for three euros – fifty cents more than the rest of their range. One euro from each sale goes to charity, a cost split between the business and customer. “I believe that acknowledging our social responsibility as a business is really important because a lot of people nowadays prefer supporting brands they can feel good about,” Jeworutzki told me.
Jeworutzki and van Montfort have built a thriving business from humble beginnings, not without their challenges either: like the crowdfunding campaign that didn’t reach it’s target – which meant they couldn’t access any of the pledges at all; and working out of a fifteen square metre kitchen with one second-hand donut fryer from the seventies, “We cleaned it for a week,” Jeworutzki said. Nonetheless that ancient fryer enabled Brammibal’s to become a vegan destination in Berlin, producing approximately a quarter of a million donuts last year, a number they’ve nearly reached already this year. Without the crowdfunding pledges, a small loan from van Montfort’s father and financing from an ecological bank has helped the business so far.
Jeworutzki left behind a full-time nursing career to launch the donut business with her partner, “Having my own business is less stressful than working in a hospital,” she told me. van Montfort, who played in a band in his former life, knew the vegan landscape of Europe pretty well from touring, and that there was a gap in the market.
The second Brammibal’s location, which opened earlier this year in Prenzlauer Berg, has fifty square metres of workspace, and was initially intended to just be their central bakery – but they realised there was enough room to have a small café in front as well. Now with higher spec equipment and much more space, they can produce seven hundred and twenty donuts per hour. (The seventies fryer has been retired, but they’re holding onto it for back-up).
It’s certainly brave to set up a donut shop – let alone a vegan donut shop – in a city that has an almost identical pastry named after it – Berlin, where the Berliner Pfannkuchen, a plum-filled traditional sweet yeasted dough pastry (similar to a donut, just missing the hole) is stocked in every traditional bakery window in every neighbourhood across the city.
Jeworutzki and van Montfort have learned valuable lessons along the way, like hiring a consultant to evaluate their business objectively. He advised them to drop the their popular breakfast plate off the menu. It was made with a lot of care and in-house ingredients, but they were losing money on it, “Everytime we served breakfast we were throwing money out the window, that was really painful,” Jeworutzki said.
Another lesson was hiring a shop manager to take over hiring the staff, and a pastry chef to run the bakery. “Bram and I would sometimes be baking for thirteen hours in the kitchen together,” Jeworutzki said, “We’ve been working a lot and that’s really stressful, but we get a lot of positive feedback and that’s really important – vegan stuff can also be pretty nice.”
