Shire Donuts to Open Second Location in Dalton
DALTON, Mass. — The popular Shire Donuts is opening a second location in Dalton this spring.
Jeff and Heather King opened their doughnut shop in Adams more than a year ago. Now they're expanding their operation to central Berkshire County because of its popularity.
After observing that more than a few of their customers were driving from southerly locations for their customized doughnuts, the Kings decided to bring them closer. Their new shop will open on Dalton Division Road in the spring.
"We've noticed since we've been open in Adams that we get a lot of traffic from Pittsfield, Dalton, Lanesborough, and South County," Jeff King said last week.
"I guess ever since we started doing online pre-ordering, you can tell where those orders are coming in from so we started tracking it and notice that we were getting a lot of orders from those areas, people were making the drive up to Adams for our doughnuts, so that's what made us start thinking about it."
The shop will be in the former Burgner's Farm Market building in a space that had held Stacie’s Corner Cafe. The doughnut connoisseurs were originally aiming for a location in Pittsfield but opted to be right on the city line.
"We had already started looking in Pittsfield and looked some other spaces, but we really liked that location, it's a great part of town, there's not a lot of other options in that part of town for people that are looking for coffee or doughnuts, you have to drive more into Pittsfield," King explained.
"So it's a great space for us to, the way she had it set up, it won't require any real heavy lifting as far as renovations, we just kind of have to add our touch bring in our equipment, and go from there."
King expects to open the Dalton shop in March, taking into consideration the possible supply chain shortages for equipment.
Shire Donuts serves cake doughnuts made fresh 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 doughnuts, frosted doughnuts, and a customer favorite: cider doughnuts.
"We do our own version of a cider doughnut, it's an apple crisp, which is probably our most popular doughnut to the extent that we actually do it the first weekend of every month," King said.
"We don't do it just during the fall, it was so popular that we decided to keep doing it year-round on the first weekend of every month, so people come in and get their cider doughnuts even in February."
The new location will feature all of the creative topping options plus some expanded coffee offerings.
In October 2020, the couple opened their first location on Summer Street in Adams. The shop was greeted with enthusiasm, serving 3,200 doughnuts in 15 hours.
In September 2021, Shire Donuts celebrated 125,000 doughnuts sold and was officially welcomed to the town with a ribbon-cutting ceremony. The Kings were praised for finding success as a small business during the COVID-19 pandemic and were commended for helping to make the town a "destination."
The venture is inspired by a doughnut shop in North Carolina's Outer Banks that is a family favorite. The Kings always had wishful conversations about opening such a shop and when the pandemic hit, they decided to act on their dream.
Daughters Lauren and Chloe King are part of the operation.
King sees the new location having similar operating hours to the original: Fridays from 7 a.m. to 11 a.m., Saturdays and Sundays from 8 to noon.
Shire Donuts is also working on improving and expanding its website to be more user-friendly for pre-ordering in both the Adams and Dalton locations.
Tags: business changes, doughnuts,
