Donuts from Sandy Pony Doughnut Shop in Annapolis, Md. were licked at the start of a TV show. Now people around the world are becoming fans.
Their doughnuts were licked at the start of a popular TV show. Now, people around the world are becoming fans.
That’s all it took for people all over the world to become fans of Sandy Pony Donuts, which has stores in Annapolis and at the Delmarva beaches.
Now, those who knew about Sandy Pony before the new Apple TV show “Pluribus” came out understood pretty easily why the character who would eventually infect the whole world would lick all the doughnuts from there.
In the show, licking the doughnuts helps spread what was essentially a “happy virus” from outer space, setting off the plot of the otherwise apocalyptic show. It’s also brought a massive spike in attention to Sandy Pony Donuts.
For 10 years, customers have been able to order doughnuts exactly how they want them.
“That was pretty much the first thing that they had asked us after we had committed,” said Sandy Pony Donuts owner and founder Ben Wang.
“They said, ‘Look, something weird is going to happen to people when they eat the doughnuts.’ To me — good, bad — to have us be included in something like this, being a small business and just being picked like this, it felt like I was winning the lottery. She reassured us, ‘We don’t think it would bring any negativity to your business. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be reaching out,’” he added.
The creator of the “Pluribus” series, Vince Gilligan, is also the creator of the Emmy Award-winning “Breaking Bad” and AMC’s “Better Call Saul.”
Wang said Gilligan read a story about the start of Sandy Pony Donuts, which began in a food truck in Chincoteague, Virginia. The lab where the doughnuts were licked is also in Maryland, at least on the show.
But Wang had to ship the doughnuts and all the merchandise out to New Mexico, where the show is shot.
More than a year later, when the trailer came out in July, the doughnuts and the logo on the boxes were unmistakably visible. That’s when everything started to change.
“We had probably like 300 calls in one day just to see if it’s a real doughnut shop,” Wang said.
The calls were coming from all over the country, too. And while Sandy Pony doesn’t ship doughnuts all over the world, it will ship merchandise.
“We made these Pluribus shirts with Sandy Pony, like a collaborative, and people have been ordering from all over the world — just from the show, which is nuts,” Wang said. “When we send out shirts or hats or anything, we send them out in the teal doughnut box, so that way people can kind of keep them as keepsakes if they want them.”
Business at the Annapolis store, located in one of the smaller shopping centers along Solomons Island Road, has also picked up, especially during the week, Wang said.
“I feel like a lot of people are getting the doughnuts just to get them … and it’s bringing in new people,” he said. “We kind of keep track of our customer base through the back end. So it’s cool to see how much that has increased and how many views we get just in traffic to our actual website.”
Sandy Pony has also revamped its website, and now links to the trailer showing the doughnut scene in the show.
“We get to see the whole back end of how much traffic is actually brought from different countries, different places and where exactly people are looking from,” Wang said. “It was just U.S., sometimes Canada, a couple little countries here and there. But now there’s a whole list of different places that have been just looking at the site, which is really cool.”
Wang said he and his wife watched the show and felt disbelief seeing their doughnuts on the big screen.
“But then you have people that are just reaching out to us through social media, through email, just like, ‘Man, this is so cool. We saw your doughnut shop there in the show,’” he added.
So far, they’ve sold nearly a thousand shirts since the show came out a few weeks ago. And every day, customers who have bought doughnuts from stores in places like Dewey or Bethany Beach are still screenshotting the scene and sending it in.
“We have a great customer base, friend base. For people to reach out and take the time to reach out and share that with us, of something they may think we know or may not think we know, I think that’s the coolest part,” Wang said.
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