A UK luxury doughnut firm whose products helped celebrate British Airways’ recent return to New York has achieved a major business ambition slightly closer to home – by setting up a stand at London’s famous Hyde Park Winter Wonderland event.
Project D, which was founded just three years ago by friends Max Poynton, Jacob Watts and Matthew Bond, is making its debut at the show, which has returned to Hyde Park for the run up to Christmas after it was cancelled last year.
The appearance caps a coming-of-age year for the Derby-based company, which has also sold its delicious hand-decorated doughnuts at this year’s British Grand Prix at Silverstone and the Arnold Sports Festival, at Birmingham’s NEC.
Project D is also going to be present at a host of Christmas light switch-ons and festive fairs across the UK this month and is making its debut at the Taste of London event at Tobacco Dock this weekend.
This company’s busy end to the year is in direct contrast to 2020, when the COVID pandemic saw all live events cancelled and Project D’s major route to market was setting up its stalls outside community centres and in pub car parks in its native Derbyshire.
Twelve months on the firm, which employs almost 100 people and provides home delivery across the UK, has been rapidly making up for lost time, with its Winter Wonderland contract providing a fitting finale to a successful first year on the national events stage.
Max Poynton, director of operations at Project D, said: “When we set up the company, a big part of what we wanted to achieve was attending the kind of big outdoor events that we would like to go to ourselves, and the iconic Hyde Park Winter Wonderland in London is definitely in that category.
“There is a fantastic energy about the food and drink scene at UK events and festivals and it’s brilliant to be a part of it. There are so many new and exciting suppliers who are making their names doing outside catering and there is far more variety in offerings than you would find in a high street.
“All the cancellations last year meant that there’s been huge excitement from customers who are determined to have a good time, and the Winter Wonderland is no different. This is our first-ever event in London and it’s a fantastic way for us to end what has been an amazing year.”
Project D’s involvement with British Airways saw the company leave individual doughnuts, each one inside one of its distinctive bright pink boxes, on every seat of a BA Airbus A350 which took 350 passengers from London Heathrow to New York earlier this month.
It was the first time that BA had been able to take foreign visitors to America following the country’s decision to lock down its borders last year and the simultaneous take-off with a plane operated by Virgin Atlantic was a world first.
Other highlights from 2021 included supplying two of its mega-doughnuts for a homecoming party thrown in honour of gold medal-winning Olympic swimmer Adam Peaty, who later bought Project D doughnuts for production staff working on BBC One’s Strictly Come Dancing show.
And the company has also opened its first store inside Loughborough University Students Union.
