OH Donut Co. Debuts Poland Location

POLAND, Ohio – OH Donut Co. will offer expanded hours and an expanded menu at its newly opened second location.

The specialty doughnut shop, at 101 S. Main St., opened its doors Thursday morning, roughly three and a half years after the One Hot Cookie spinoff opened its first location in retail space it shares with Spruce Home Décor & Gift Store on the west end of U.S. Route 224, at 1315 Boardman-Canfield Road, Boardman.

“We love the location,” which is “right in the heart of the community,” Bergen Giordani said.

OH Donut Co. is owned by Giordani and Morgen Chretien, the mother-daughter entrepreneurs who launched One Hot Cookie in April 2013, and Dr. Nino Rubino, a partner in Poland Family Medical.

“He is very much dialed into the Poland community and always felt a tie to this area,” Giordani said.

The partners had been scouting potential sites in the village since January, months before the decision was made to close the downtown Youngstown OH Donut location that was the original One Hot Cookie shop and subsequently was repurposed for OH Donut, Giordani said.

The intent was to operate the three OH Donut shops but keeping the Youngstown location “just was not financially feasible” because of access issues caused by ongoing street projects downtown.

“When we were looking for our next location, we wanted to kind of capture the other side” of Route 224, Chretien said. “It really is a whole different audience down here, even though it’s only three miles down the road.”

As natives of New Castle, Pa., before they moved to Ohio, “We always joke that when you’re from Pennsylvania the world ends at the Southern Park Mall,” Giordani said.

The Poland location opens a business opportunity on the east end of U.S. route 224, she said. “And we really liked the small-town community feel that the village provides,” she added.

OH Donut occupies about 700 square feet of space, she said.

“It’s an old building. It has its charm, it has its workarounds, but it’s been fun,” Chretien said. “It’s cozy.”

OH Donut Poland, which has three full-time and eight part-time employees, is open more days and for longer hours than the Boardman shop, she said. Additionally, it has a larger lunch menu and serves ice cream.

Bergen said she expects the Poland shop to have more of a “neighborhood coffee shop feel” than the Boardman location. “We anticipate being that ‘fourth space’ that they talk about,” where parents can leave one of their children to study while they go to drop off or pick up another, she continued.

Traffic Thursday morning was already tracking better than OH Donut’s pervious openings, Chretien said. Also, One Hot Cookie’s performance is up 10% for the year so far.

Also, response is strong for the new Sweet Sips mobile bar spinoff, with bookings into 2023 and 2024, Giordani said.

“We have tons of weddings for next summer,” Cindy Digiantonio, sales and events manager, said.

Giordani and Chretien don’t have plans for additional OH Donut expansions at the moment, but don’t rule out the possibility down the road.

“We never say never but the opportunity has to be right,” Giordani said. “And I feel like our team would kill us if we took on another project in the next couple of months so we might need to slow it down a little bit.”

Pictured at top from left: Bergen Giordani and Morgan Chretien, owners, OH Donut Co.

Copyright 2024 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.