Krofne Doughnuts: Doughnuts with a difference

Two years ago Danijela Vrkic was working in the public service.

“It paid the bills but it really wasn’t satisfying work. And having a child with a disability, you’ve always got on the back on your mind: what’s their future going to look like?”

Danijela’s son Anthony has Down syndrome, an intellectual disability common to over 13,000 people in Australia. With Anthony in his teens, Danijela was concerned about his job opportunities when he left school.

“That’s why the business was born,” says Danijela who set up Krofne Doughnuts, a market stall selling Croatian yeast-style doughnuts. The doughnuts are made using a recipe that’s been passed down in Danijela’s family for at least four generations.

“It’s ancient,” laughs Danijela. “And it’s very unique. We’ve searched the internet to see whether there’s anything even remotely like it and there’s nothing.”

Step one for Danijela was working out how to adapt the recipe to make large amounts.

“We’ve kept the recipe the same but we had to adjust the amounts of some of the ingredients to make it work, because it’s not just as simple as duplicating or triplicating a recipe—you have to work out the technical side. Once we worked that out, there was nothing stopping us.”

After many hours developing the doughnuts (Danijela’s neighbours enjoyed many taste-tests) Krofne Doughnuts was ready to launch at the markets.

“When we opened our first market stall, we just got so much positive feedback, not just because of the product but because of the social aspect of it.”

Danijela now employs ten people, five with disabilities.

“They’re the best employees,” Danijela says of her staff with disabilities.

“They turn up to work on time, they do their job and they say thank you at the end of each day—it’s great. They just have another dynamic to them, I can’t explain it.”

Danijela says kids with disabilities often have a hard time finding meaningful employment.

“I offered one of our employees a part-time job at Christmas and she started crying. She said, ‘I can’t believe that I’ve finally got a job.’ And I just thought, that’s heartbreaking, you know?

“Employers are often frightened to put on employees with disabilities. Sometimes their productivity isn’t fantastic but that’s okay; there are ways you can manage that. For me, for instance, instead of having somebody work eight hours, we might give them three or four hours and then the next person will come on.

“If you’re any type of reasonable person you can make some reasonable adjustments in your workplace to make things work. And it’s not hard, it’s not hard to make those adjustments.”

Danijela is passionate about equal pay and doesn’t believe in paying assisted wages to employees with disabilities. The assisted or supported wage system allows employers to pay a productivity-based wage to a person with a disability.

“So for instance,” Danijela explains, “If I could produce a doughnut in two seconds, and it took them ten seconds, [an assessor] would calculate the difference and then work out a percentage of how much the worker should be paid based on their productivity.

“It’s absolutely disgraceful. In some instances these kids only get paid two dollars an hour. A lot of employers take advantage of these people and it’s just wrong.

“We pay full award wage. We’re a for-profit business and I believe in equal pay for everyone.”

Danijela says her employees get to experience every role in the business.

“They will be involved in every aspect from making the dough to cooking the dough to serving at the counter and making the coffee as well. They’re all really keen to try everything, which is really great because we can rotate them so they don’t get stuck in a mundane role.”

So what of the doughnuts? Danijela says, “We do have a phenomenal product, and we’re very proud of that. Our doughnut is really light and airy and it doesn’t absorb the fat, so when you bite into it you don’t have grease running down your hand.

When Krofne isn’t selling made-to-order doughnuts at various Canberra markets, they’re preparing doughnuts for catering. They do this in the kitchen of Communities At Work, a service provider in Canberra for people with disability and people experiencing hardship.

“They’re an amazing organisation,” Danijela says of Communities at Work, where Anthony attends a program. Use of the kitchen came about when the CEO Lorcan Murphy heard about Krofne Doughnuts.

“When we were ready to start employing people we thought, well why not employ some other Downs kids? So I approached Communities at Work and they put it out to their families.

“The CEO heard about this and decided he wanted to have a talk to me. Out of that meeting was, ‘Break your lease in your other kitchen and come and use ours for nothing,’ which has helped us immensely.”

The success of Krofne Doughnuts has seen them catering for the Prime Minister at Family Day at The Lodge, and for The Inclusion and Diversity Awards.

“Canberra’s a small city so word of mouth travels very hard. If you have a good product and a good cause, people will come to you,” says Danijela.

Next on the cards for Krofne is moving into a commercial space somewhere in Canberra (lease negotiations were in progress at the time of this interview) and expanding into franchises.

“We’re working on a franchise model at the moment and, I say this boldly and proudly, it will be Australia’s first doughnut social enterprise!

“I’m working closely with the CEO of Communities at Work and we’ve got lawyers working on the franchise agreements for us at the moment. There’s so much work that has to go behind it, especially this, purely because of the social aspect. It needs to remain a social enterprise employing people with special needs.”

With the success of Krofne expanding as fast as it has, it seems Danijela’s aim to secure Anthony’s employment has been met.

“Anthony was the reason we started this and to be quite honest, I never thought in my wildest dreams that we’d grow as fast as what we have.

“Personally, it just makes me feel really good that I’m able to help, or change the lives of some of these people that work for us. It’s just so nice to see; they turn up for work and they’re actually happy. They’re happy to come to work. It’s lovely.”