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View ProfilesPublished May 7, 2024 at 1:31 p.m. | Updated May 8, 2024 at 10:11 a.m.
Growing up in Bolton in the early 2000s, the Townsend kids had the coolest mom on the block — er, slope. Debra Townsend was known for hosting up to 30 of their friends at a time in the family's large, ski lodge-style home. Nearly a quarter century later, siblings Brittiny, Matthew, Hannah and Ian are grown up and scattered across the globe, but they all talk every day. And Douglas Sweets, the cookie bakery their mom founded in 2011, helps keep them close.
Debra, 66, and daughter Hannah, 32, may be the only family members on the payroll at present, but the Scottish shortbread company has employed the whole family — both officially and unofficially, as small businesses are wont to do — at various times throughout its 13-year history.
"The kids would come home from university and help, especially at Christmastime, when it got busy," Debra recalled of the early days, when she baked in her home kitchen.
These days, the operation runs out of a commercial space in Shelburne, and her kids need not don aprons if they come home for the holidays. With Hannah working remotely from Montréal, Debra has built a brand that captures the artisan food culture of Vermont in an old-world treat. Already available in gift shops and fine foods stores across the Lower 48, the crisp, buttery, sweet-but-not-too-sweet treats will soon reach a new group of foodies nationwide, thanks to an expanded seasonal partnership with Whole Foods Market.
Amid all the success, the Vermont company remains rooted in family.
"Being a mother is absolutely everything to me," Debra said. And the business' origin story is tied to an unconventional choice the family made back in 2008.
After separating from her husband, Debra whisked away her four teens on an epic two-year backpacking trip. With funds from the sale of their house, the Townsends started in Peru and journeyed through 45 countries and all but one continent, mostly staying in hostels and keeping a tight budget. They saw the wonders of the world, perused markets, took cooking and language classes, and, being Vermonters, tried to visit Ben & Jerry's scoop shops along the way.
When the trip ended in 2010, the kids went off to college and Debra found herself back in Bolton and in need of income. So she dusted off her mother's shortbread recipe and sold cookies at a Christmas market in Richmond under the name Douglas Sweets, in honor of her mother, Joan Douglas. A Scottish immigrant, Douglas had developed the recipe when she was 17, missing Scottish shortbread while living in the U.S.
To Debra's surprise, she sold out at the market.
"It's 50 percent less sugar than an ordinary cookie; it's all good ingredients; it's all natural. I know it's a good product, and I thank my mum for it," she said, crediting the family recipe rather than her own baking talent or business acumen.
Encouraged by her early success, Debra began approaching local food stores that sold Vermont products. Healthy Living in South Burlington was the first to carry her cookies, she said. City Market, Onion River Co-op in Burlington and Hunger Mountain Co-op in Montpelier followed. "Slowly, the business built organically," she said.
In 2013, with fresh-outta-business-school confidence, Hannah joined the company, working her way up to a COO role that includes strategic planning, sales and corporate relationships, and shared responsibility for account management, branding and administrative tasks.
To meet growing demand, in 2016 the duo moved the operation into a quaint red building behind Fiddlehead Brewing and Folino's pizzeria in Shelburne. (The next-door neighbor is another specialty food company, Vermont Tortilla.)
While the Townsends declined to give exact numbers, they said sales increased by 65 percent in their first year together at the bakery. Sales climbed by 400 percent from 2016 to the end of 2023, they said.
Despite enthusiastic support from Vermont's locavores, shortbread doubters remain. For a simple dessert — some recipes include just butter, flour and sugar — shortbread is notoriously tricky to nail. It can come out dry, hard and tasteless — or worse, soft and greasy. At tastings, Debra sometimes has to convince people to try it.
Hannah suggested that many people just don't realize how great shortbread can be. To rectify that, she took charge of changing Douglas Sweets' packaging. "I really wanted 'cookie' to stand out, not necessarily 'shortbread,'" she said.
Whatever you call them, Douglas Sweets' treats are excellent. Their elegant, scalloped-edge shape and naturally long shelf life make them great for gifting. The perfectly crisp, biscuit-style shortbread is rich and light at the same time. A hint of salt hits the palate first, and, as the cookie dissolves into buttery crumbles, subtle sweetness accents the featured flavor, of which there are currently 10.
The lineup includes pecan, orange blossom and salted caramel, as well as chocolate chip-studded flavors such as double dark, coconut and latte. Debra said the last two will be retired soon as the company prepares for its Whole Foods partnership. A new flavor exclusive to the grocery chain is in the works, and the Townsends plan to increase cookie production by 15 percent at their Shelburne facility.
While the Whole Foods expansion will raise its profile, Douglas Sweets already has fans around the country. Maddy Wright, 26, of Sacramento, Calif., includes the cookies in curated book boxes she ships from her online bookstore, Obsidian Bookhouse. In Douglas Sweets shortbread, Wright said she found the right "snackable" book accompaniment.
"Something about their brand story, flavor profiles, and even the packaging felt special — like I was in Vermont myself and could smell the cookies baking in the other room," she wrote by email.
The company, which employs two full-time bakers alongside a crew of seasonal employees, is going strong partly because of the Townsends' willingness to adapt and make decisions that meet the needs of both the market and their family. They have streamlined their offerings — previous flavors inspired by their world travels, such as Thai basil peanut, were delicious but too niche. And they now mix in chocolate chips instead of hand-dipping the cookies in chocolate, a physically tiring task that Debra used to do by herself.
"We've tried to automate [the process] as much as possible so that no employee who replaced my mum was in the same situation, in pain going home," Hannah said, noting that the chocolate coating also had a tendency to melt, which limited the shipping possibilities.
For a time, the Shelburne bakery also included a retail shop and small café, but to avoid burnout, the company gradually shifted to a wholesale-only model — with online purchases available for pickup. (A six-ounce bag of Douglas Sweets shortbread costs $7.50.)
The Townsends also instituted a four-day workweek to help achieve that elusive work-life balance. Starting from scratch required Debra to "throw everything I had at the business," she said, but Hannah's involvement has helped her slow down. Now, Debra handles product development, bakery operations and local business relationships.
"Our priority was to make a good shortbread product that we felt proud of; Hannah's priority was to do so in way that allowed us to have a balance in our lives," she said. The schedule leaves more possibility for travel — a necessity for Debra, whose kids all live in different countries and whose first grandchild was just born in Portugal.
Despite upscaling and automation, the Townsends maintain they haven't sacrificed the quality of their product. On the contrary, Debra said the shortbread is even better now than when she was making it all by hand. Rolling out the dough over and over made it denser, she explained. Now, with the help of a machine called a depositor that cuts the cookies, they're handled much less and retain that ethereal, airy crunch.
"It's closer now to the way my mum's recipe was than at any other time," she said.
Hannah noted that the imprint of each generation of her family is evident in the evolution of Douglas Sweets' packaging. Though her grandmother never produced shortbread to sell, she said, the first version of the design reflected her influence: "It had bows, and it was quaint and cute."
"Then a couple years later, it was my mum who really took the reins, and the packaging was very modern and sleek and cool," she continued, before teasing that another change is coming. "Now it feels like it's my turn, my opportunity to bring it to its next stage," she said. "And I'm lucky because I have so many siblings to help."
Debra has relinquished control of the new look, saying it will be as much a surprise to her as it is to customers — but she trusts Hannah to get it right. As a testament to their tight family bond, she said, the kids have always come through when she needed them most.
"I would have quit long ago, because being in business is so hard, especially when you're by yourself," she said. "As soon as the kids stepped in, especially Hannah, it made it all better because I was doing it not just for me but for them, too."
The original print version of this article was headlined "Recipe for Success | In Shelburne, family-run Douglas Sweets bakes Scottish shortbread like Mom used to make"
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