Classroom Project: Design A Donut
Back in May, we were invited to a school here in Regina to judge a Design a Donut competition. It was so much fun! Their teacher (Mme Gardiner) gave her grade 3 students a persuasive writing assignment – design a donut and present it to a bakery owner for a chance to have your donut featured in the bakery! We had so much fun with it and we’ve had a lot of other teachers inquire about it so I’ve decided to put together some more information for you.
So here’s how it works, you have your students use this Persuasive Writing Worksheet and design a donut including why a bakery should choose to sell their creation. What makes this creation unique? What types of people would be interested in buying this product? Describe your donut in detail and how you came up with this idea. This worksheet includes both an area for the printing and for drawing their creation.
The teacher can contact us at the bakery and we can arrange a time to come out to your classroom for the students’ presentations. During the presentation and judging day, each student can stand in front of the class and talk about their donut and read out their writing assignment. The more creative the better! At our first judging competition, we even had a student make a t-shirt to match her donut idea!
At the end of the presentations, we (Go Big Treats) then reviews all of the submissions and chooses a winner. Yes, the winner is chosen at that time right at the school! After that, we hand out freshly baked plain donuts to each student along with a candy buffet so that they can make their own donut to take home. All of our donuts are made in a peanut and tree nut free kitchen and all of the candies we provide are peanut and tree nut free as well. Our youngest son is severely allergic to nuts so we understand the importance of this in school.
That’s not all! We then work with the teacher (and the winner’s parent) to set up a time for the winning student to come into the bakery and decorate their creation with us! We then feature their creation for sale in our bakery for a week.
The cost of this classroom program is $8 per child. That price includes all taxes, all donuts and candy, our time at the school, our time with the winning student at the bakery, etc.
This program is best for children who are at a printing level – so grade two’s and up.
Please contact us a 306-569-9519 if you have any questions or would like to set up your own competition at school.
New Look!
It was much overdue but we have a new look! The old siding came down, the outside was painted to match our bright playful theme, and the weather finally warmed up enough to put on our window decal.
You’d actually be surprised how many people have come in since the upgrade to say “when did you open up here?”…umm, 5 months ago. Ha! It’s funny how a little paint can make such a big difference.
See you soon, cookie monsters!
New Location!
Yes, we now have a storefront location!
We moved into the Cathedral Village location in January 2019 and we couldn’t be more excited about it! We’re located right on 13th Avenue (2816 – 13th Avenue) between Rae and Retallack. It’s a great location for a specialized bakery like ours and the support from the community has been amazing!
Visit our Shop page for the most updated listing of our hours and we look forward to serving you in our new location soon!
Bakery Swag Bag Ideas
If you’re checking this post out, I assume you’re likely a bakery owner looking for some bakery swag bag ideas for an upcoming trade show. Or maybe you’re a trade show attendee wondering what will be in the next Go Big Treats swag bags. Either way – welcome! Let’s start by explaining what a swag bag is – a swag bag is typically a fun treat bag that you hand out to trade show attendees. Swag bags are usually limited to the first X amount of people. Depending on the size of the show, that number could be the first 10 people through the door or the first 100. Either way, we have some cute but cost effective ideas for you.
Swag bags aren’t exclusive to bakeries. You’ll find them for almost any market – bakeries, jewelry, artwork, clothing, etc. For this article, we’re sticking to items with a bakery theme but if you work in a different market these suggestions may help you brainstorm your own ideas.
Bakery Swag Bag Items:
A lot of times, it’s nice to give a small sample of your work in a swag bag. The problem with a bakery is that (1) fresh baking doesn’t last very long and trade show organizers usually want to assemble these swag bags a couple of weeks before an event and (2) depending on the type of baking you sell, it can be hard to package it up. For example, it would be a bit messy to drop a mini cupcake in a swag bag! With this in mind, we’ve put together a few ideas that still stick to that bakery theme without the actual baking.
For the next Go Big Treats sale, we’ve put together “Beauty & Brains Treat Bags”. We went with this because we have a Beauty & Brains cookie so this bag sticks to our theme. In case you’re not familiar with it, here’s what our Beauty & Brains Cookie looks like.
The “brains” part of the cookie are the Smarties and Nerds candies plus the little smart cookie with glasses. The “beauty” part of the cookie are the Hot Lips candy and the cute tiara sprinkle. So for our swag bags, we included mini boxes of both Smarties and Nerds for a sweet treat then we covered the “beauty” part with a candy-flavoured lip gloss.
If you’re familiar with our brand, you’ll know we use a lot of funny little sayings in our brand signature bubble letters. We tied this into our theme with cute little fridge magnets.
To finish the bags off, we put a promotional postcard inside that tells the customer a bit more about our company, what we make, and where they can find us (our social media channels and a website link to our pop up calendar).
Bakery Swag Bag Ideas:
Some other fun suggestions for a bakery swag bag include:
- a small sample of your work like a mini sugar cookie
- something to enjoy with your baking like an envelope of gourmet hot chocolate
- small baking tools like a cute colourful whisk, spatula or cookie cutter
- a recipe card with one of your favourite recipes (not a recipe for something you make in your bakery, of course)
- a small kitchen timer for baking
- a handy conversions card (like how many tablespoons in a 1/2 cup) as a fridge magnet
- a tea towel
- dry ingredients mix (like this Halloween candies one) with instructions on what wet ingredients to add to make cookies
- unique jar of sprinkles
- cute paper napkins for a party
Have you been to a trade show where they’ve handed out swag bags? What are some things that you’ve received? We’d love to hear some more suggestions!
Yes, We Do Fundraisers
We’ve been asked about Regina area fundraisers quite often so I thought it would help if we put together some information for you to review. The fundraiser packages are flexible and can be fine-tuned to fit your group’s needs.
We’ve put together some information below on a couple of our more popular options but first take a look at this PDF file to start brainstorming some ideas that will work for your group.
For school or team fundraisers, we have a few different options. Two of our most popular options are:
1) We can set up a pop up shop for an hour at the school/facility (at an evening event like a school dance, meet the teacher night, etc.) where people could purchase a cookie, cinnamon bun or edible cookie dough.
or…
2) We could do a preorder – kind of like you’d do for a fundraising lunch – where we’d provide you with order forms where kids could choose from 6 different options. The school or group would collect the funds and preorder the items at least one week in advance. We’d then distribute the cookies to your school for you to distribute to the kids.
For both options, our products are the regular price (example, XL cookies or cinnamon buns are $6 each including taxes) and $1.00 from each item sold we send back to the school/group as the donation.
To make the most money, we recommend the preorder. That way we know exactly how many treats to bring and have time to prepare the orders. For a pop up sale, it’s kind of a hard guess on how many items we may be able to sell. With our first school fundraiser, we set up a pop up shop with 46 cookies and sold out in about 20 minutes so we had lots of disappointed kiddos. It’s tough to guess how popular a pop up will be though so we bring a limited quantity so we aren’t left with lots of leftovers.
We understand that all organizations are different and what works for one group may not work for another. Contact us and we can customize a fundraiser plan that fits your needs.