Years of experimentation, hard graft, and some help from industry professionals are behind one of the hottest new bakery brands in the free-from sector, Borough 22.
British Baker recently caught up with Ryan Panchoo, founder of the gluten-free, plant-based doughnut specialist, to discover more about the company’s origin story, how its grown, and its latest achievements.
It begins in a similar fashion to fellow allergen-safe bakery firm Just Love, with the initial idea born from food considerations within the family. Panchoo’s kids had multiple intolerances, the main one being to gluten. Back in 2012, he started feeling frustrated and disappointed with the out-of-home offerings at entertainment venues.
“All their friends are enjoying this food and they can’t have any. They really want to try it, but they know that it makes them really, really ill,” he says. “They’ve got their own little packed lunchbox, so it’s almost like they’re being excluded from that experience.”
Rolling in doughnuts
Despite having no prior baking experience, Panchoo felt compelled to craft some sweet bakery treats in his kitchen. There were plenty of gluten-free and vegan brownies and cupcakes around, so he chose to focus on doughnuts, noting they were one of the things that people on a gluten-free diet miss the most.
Removing gluten from the recipe proved far trickier than removing the dairy elements, and after 18 months of experimentation he came up with his own baked doughnut recipe.
Photos of his gluten-free doughnuts posted to Facebook communities garnered much interest and, working four days a week as a project manager for a property investment company, he used his extra day to deliver doughnuts around London. Knowing branding was important, in October 2014 he officially named the business Borough 22, a reference to his home borough of Greenwich which is marked #22 on the administrative map.
Note to Selfridges
Six months later, Panchoo spotted an Instagram thread in which Selfridges said they were always looking for suppliers of gluten-free food for their food hall in London. He booked a meeting with a Selfridges buyer, who loved the doughnut samples, and they struck a deal to supply six lines on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays.
It was the start of a solid relationship with the retailer, and one that allowed Panchoo to better learn the trade. Selfridges taught him about purchasing orders, and use of trays rather than cupcake caddies in delivery transit, as well as adding labelling with best before dates. He was also helped to obtain gluten-free certification via the ELISA testing method.
By February 2016, however, Panchoo was burnt out with all the early morning weekend starts and took around eight months away from the business. He came back with a renegotiated offer to correct his previously “diabolical” low pricing and a refreshed range that was now fully vegan – his doughnuts had always been plant-based, but he used toppings like salted caramel and Nutella. He also successfully tested freezing them, meaning he could do a bigger order drop-offs once every week or two.
Borough 22’s stockist list grew, peaking around 16 in central London and including Planet Organic. Selfridges also sent the doughnuts to its stores in Birmingham and Manchester.
Going full time
In February 2017, he was made redundant from his project manager role and switched Borough 22 from a side hustle to a full-time occupation.
One of the strong believers in the brand was coffee chain Timberyards, which had three months left on the lease of a unit in Boxpark Shoreditch. An offer of 100% of the proceeds from doughnut sales there without any rent contributions proved a significant catalyst for business. Turnover reached £45k in 2017, more than double that of the previous year.
Panchoo was witnessing the growing potential of his company but admits to panicking back then at the thought of not having a safety net of a regular salary. “Even though I was a project manager, my project management skills just sort of went out the window,” he adds. Nevertheless, Borough 22 rose to just shy of a six-figure turnover in 2019.
He was also still baking in his home kitchen in Plumstead, which had to be arranged around breakfast and dinner with his kids, a tiring process. “Lockdown came in 2020 and I was like, ‘Oh, man, I’m finally going to get a break’. Business was doing OK, but it had plateaued,” he says.
With everyone stuck at home and many wanting free-from treats, his online trade flourished. He upped production to accommodate 40 orders of half-dozen boxes per day, delivered by courier company APC Overnight, and generated enough funds to build an external kitchen in his back garden. Sales started tailing off towards the end of 2021, though, and dropped off completely in 2022, forcing him to let one of his two bakers go and reducing hours for the other. But he now had a lot more time on his hands.
Fried endeavour
Panchoo knew in his “heart of hearts” that baked doughnuts were not the ultimate product, and that he needed to come out with a deep-fried doughnut that was gluten-free and vegan. First, he tried adapting doughnut recipes from the likes of Basque cookbook author Aran Goyoaga and pastry chef Ravneet Gill. “I was trying to take everything out, like soya and egg. It just didn’t work,” he recalls.
It took another ten months to perfect the free-from batter for frying, with Panchoo documenting the entire development process through videos posted to social media. This meant that by the time he launched his fried doughnuts at a London pop-up in February 2023, there was a queue round the corner, and the products sold out in 45 minutes and had many leaving empty-handed.
Either sugared or filled with the likes of lemon curd, traditional raspberry jam, custard, or chocolate cream, Borough 22’s new fried range received several impassioned messages via social media from across the country. “People were crying, saying ‘I can’t tell you that the last time I had a jam doughnut’. Some had been Coeliac for a few years and remembered what doughnuts were like; a few people had never had a doughnut in their life,” comments Panchoo.
Out of home
Sales of fried doughnuts took off at pace, but the Plumstead kitchen was creating a bottleneck with daily capacity maxing out at 360 units. So, in November 2023, Borough 22 took on funding from three investors to support its next business leap: a move into a commercial kitchen space at the Bermondsey branch of Karma Kitchen.
Workforce has been expanded to seven full-time staff members – a head baker, two senior bakers, and four operatives – working shifts from 6:30am to 9pm, seven days a week. A strong online presence has seen sales via the website account for 80% of business at Borough 22, with 80% of the orders being for fried lines.
Meanwhile, another milestone for the business last year came in November, when it launched its first permanent concession at Selfridges Foodhall in London, open seven days a week. Turnover from 2024 is now expected to be quadruple that of the previous year.
There has also been a focus on ensuring products are free from all 14 major allergens, with nuts completely removed from production in Bermondsey. “The thing about allergens is that they’re not discriminatory. It doesn’t matter about your nationality, or religion, or gender,” remarks Panchoo. “We want to open our doors to everyone in every community. We’ve done that consciously.” Borough 22 products are also kosher certified, and naturally halal due to them being vegan and made without alcohol.
Panchoo is keen to thank the food industry professionals that had been “very generous with their knowledge” in the development of his doughnuts. “I’m not a pastry chef, I’ve just learned how to make good gluten-free, vegan products. Those people really helped me develop as a baker to get the recipe to the stage where it’s at now.”
For example, TV chef Shelina Permalloo gave a recipe for crème brûlée which is still used to this day at Borough 22, and Harrod’s head pastry chef Philip Khoury provided a breakdown of how to use it in a doughnut.
NPD action
For the Christmas season just gone, the company unveiled a Festive Box (rsp: £32 for a box of six) containing flavours such as Candy Cane, S’mores, Boston Cream, Cranberry Glaze, Mince Pie, and NoEgg Nog (zero alcohol).
More recently, it teamed up with matcha brand PerfectTed to roll out two new fried doughnut flavours for the month-long Veganuary celebrations – one topped with matcha glaze and the other filled with matcha cream. These are available for £6.49 each or £34 for a box of six, either at Selfridges or via Deliveroo to London postcodes.
Panchoo believes there’s always room for development and plans to work on refining the baked doughnuts and produce different shapes of fried doughnuts or hybrids like cronuts. He also intends to create a reduced sugar range using stevia or xylitol for toppings and fillings.
Peeking forward
The rise of the Borough 22 brand puts it in a good position to capitalise on the continued growth of the gluten-free bakery market. Panchoo notes that more and more people are being diagnosed Coeliac, while some are looking to eliminate gluten for alternate health reasons or as a lifestyle choice.
Among the future goals are supermarket listings, such as with Ocado, as well as retail expansion outside of the capital. Manchester would the next most popular city to set up a brick-and-mortar shop in, reckons Panchoo, followed by Birmingham, then Bristol. Europe would be easy as its close, he muses, and the Middle East is another potential overseas market to enter. “I think we would kill it in America. There’s such an appetite there,” he asserts.
Panchoo concludes by expressing his desire for Borough 22 to be as global as Krispy Kreme or Dunkin’ Donuts. “It’s not necessarily a gluten-free, plant-based doughnut brand, it’s a brand that makes great doughnuts that just happen to be safe for everybody,” he adds.
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