It Took More Than Biscuits and Donuts to Make Rise the Triangle's Fastest Growing Food Empire

The wall of Rise's new downtown Durham store

If you show up at Rise Biscuits & Donuts at four o'clock on a Friday morning, you're already running four hours behind Bethany Conver.

The baker has been at the Rise near Durham's Southpoint Mallthe flagship operation of a suddenly sprawling local franchise, with big plans to go national within the next yearsince midnight, starting by herself the process that will yield a day's worth of donuts. The approaching weekend always means big biscuit-and-donut business, she says, so this will be a busy day. From Thursday through Sunday, this is Conver's life.

At this early hour, the compact kitchen is chilly, and it smells mostly of grease and sugar. Conver's daily ritual is methodical, maybe even rote, but it's not light work. To make a massive batch of apple fritters, for instance, she wraps large chunks of chopped apples and multiple dollops of cinnamon into a swath of thick dough. She wields her pastry cutter like an ax, each blow landing with a thud and separating the start of one fritter from the rest. Bethany folds the dough and repeats, manually blending the pastry each time.

The donuts are proofed, or allowed to rise, one final time before they're fried, glazed, and iced. Conver glazes them when they emerge from the fryer, using a slotted stainless-steel glazing table that allows several donuts to get their sugary shell at once.

Just after four, Conver begins to get backup. First, a lone decorator arrives to fill, ice, and sprinkle donuts for hours. The rest of the crewresponsible for making biscuits, running the registers, making sure the restaurant is ready to servearrives around six a.m., an hour before the doors open. And when they do, more often than not, a few customers are already queued up outside.

Those lines, it seems, are starting to show up everywhere, just like Rise. In the four years since Rise opened this single storefront near Southpoint, the business has grown from one location to a string of seven stores across the Triangletwo in Durham, two in Raleigh (with a third coming at the end of May), and one each in Morrisville and Carrboro. Rise is expanding throughout and beyond North Carolina, too, with twenty-three franchises already sold from Wilmington and Charlotte to as far away as Dallas.

And Rise is now moving beyond its reputation as a breakfast emporium: the new downtown Durham location offers lunchtime biscuits, with flavors including a version of Nashville hot chicken, a pork chop biscuit, and even a sloppy joe.

Really, Rise was built to rise.

A decade ago, Tom Ferguson had four ideas for a quick-service food establishmentburgers, biscuits, pasta, and chicken. In 2008, the first theme became OnlyBurger, a pioneering Triangle food truck that has since spawned two brick-and-mortar locations and helped foster the area's love of mobile eats.

But the pasta and chicken ideas have been shelved, temporarily at least. Ferguson has had bigger fritters to fry for the last half-decade.

When Ferguson first started considering Rise, he only intended to make biscuits. But on a scouting trip to Portland, Oregon, where he was in town to visit Pine State Biscuits, a friend took him to the city's famed Voodoo Doughnut. One donut was all it took to set him on a second path.

"I took a bite of the maple bacon and thought, 'Oh, I'm doing both,'" he remembers.

Ferguson felt specialty donuts, much like biscuits, were an underserved market in the Triangle. When he returned to Durham, he bought the necessary equipment and spent nine months developing the techniques.

Making donuts was a new craft for Ferguson, but working in the food industry wasn't. In fact, donuts seem to be the culmination of a lifelong focus on food. In high school, Ferguson struggled with dyslexia and finished low in his class rankings. But along with playing football, cooking for friends was the only thing that gave him real satisfaction.

After a stint in the Army, Ferguson decided to pursue the hobby full-time. He began making omelets at a Marriott in Austin. He spent the next several years bouncing among jobs, following his Marriott boss to Washington, D.C., before returning to Austin, enrolling in culinary school in New York, and making eight more moves across the country before settling in the Triangle in 1998. He worked in area staples like the late Pop's and the upscale Nana's. He also worked in the more business-oriented world of catering.

"I would work in a restaurant to learn how to cook," he says, "and then I would go to a catering company, and the catering companies didn't know how to cook that well."

In 2000, Ferguson launched Durham Catering Company. He still used the kitchen at Nana's, where he first met sous chef Brian Wiles. A few years later, Wiles was managing another kitchen when he heard of Ferguson's ambitious new breakfast plan. He dropped by Ferguson's office and left a sticky note on the deskget in touch.

Ever since, the pair (and third partner, Andy Seamans) has been the force behind Rise's ascent. Like Ferguson, Wiles's restaurant acumen comes from years in kitchens, not a business program.

"Tom gave me the confidence and the knowledge to understand the back end of itthe financial end, the payroll, the money going out versus the money coming in," Wiles says. "That was the missing element."

Much of this back-end business happens in what Ferguson calls his "war room." It is, in fact, a modest, unadorned guest bedroom in his Hope Valley home. Three large computer monitors help him oversee his fiefdom. A computer at each store has a dashboard, which managers use to stay current on new recipes and other dispatches from Ferguson. And Trello, a web-based management system, has ensured fewer missed phone calls and fewer flurries of emailsreally, more efficiency. For Ferguson, this is a point of pride.

"I believe that being dyslexic makes you learn stuff differently and approach stuff differently. It makes me want to connect the lines between people and what they're doingmake it easier, break it down, just get to the point," Ferguson says. "If there's an issue, I don't want to just fix the issue. I want to go back and fix the problem."

Long lines and wait times, for instance, were common gripes in Rise's early days. Rise initially used a take-a-ticket, deli-style line system for orders. But the volume of sales was higher than anticipated, so the process created chaos. Complaints forced Ferguson to reimagine Rise's customer service. He did away with the tickets and installed a new point-of-sale system that eliminated the need for orders to be printed at all.

"We evolved with what the customers were saying, and that made them rightfully feel that they were a part of it," Ferguson says. "We were listening."

The first day under the new system, the crew was able to handle orders more easily, translating to a $500 jump in sales in a single day. Now, on an average Saturday at Southpoint, Rise sells more than seventeen hundred donuts and nearly nine hundred biscuits.

That would mean a lot of numbers for customers to take.

Before business could boom, Rise had to learn to make donuts.

Three months before Ferguson and Wiles opened their first store, they embarked on what they call "The Donut Tour," traveling across the United States to visit seven cities in eight days: Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, Austin, St. Louis, Atlanta, and New York.

"Tom has always been a big believer in research and development," Wiles says. "Going out, seeing things, seeing how they operate, and trying to build the concept behind the idea, instead of just having the idea and going from there."

Some of the places they visited were great, others only OK, Wiles says. They thought they could do better. What's more, the exploratory mission proved integral to Rise's approach to flavor. Shops in Austin, New York, and Portland inspired Rise's all-important tripartite system of "old school, new school, our school" donuts.

Rise's "old school" donuts are familiar favorites, and its "new school" donuts tend to follow trends, like the "cronie"their take on the cronut fad. All of these categories shift a little every month, based on management directive.

The "our school" recipes, though, are new inventions, like the delightful Passion Fruit Tango donut, which boasts a passion fruit-flavored filling and an icing made with the citrusy powdered drink of childhood, Tang.

Some suggestions for these flavors come from friends or customers, but they're often made by Rise employees. Ferguson and Wiles empower each store and its chef to take their own chances and make their own choices. This facet is what keeps Rise from growing stale.

The varieties don't always last, like a peanut butter-and-jelly donut that proved too complicated to make in high numbers, but little else is off-limits. In late February, for instance, the specials included a salted caramel yeast donut and another that was a nod to King Cake, the Mardi Gras staple, some even stuffed with the traditional tiny plastic baby that's supposed to bring good luck.

Wiles and Ferguson agree that fancy flavors are a secondary concern. With both biscuits and donuts, texture is paramount. For biscuits, it's the balance between a fluffy interior and a slightly crispy exterior. Donuts, Ferguson explains, should have what he calls "mouth pull."

"When you bite into it and you pull it, does it pull with it? Or does it break off, kind of a little stale?" he explains. "If the texture's right, the flavor can follow."

This baker's mantra seems to hold for Rise as an enterprise. Ferguson and Wiles have built systems that they can manage and expand without too much constant reinvention, and they've empowered employees to make each location their own. The flavor follows.

"It's a little surreal to see it grow," says Wiles, a few days after the people of Carrboro begin lining up outside the store. "But I keep that in check by saying if we don't keep this tight and keep our product correct, and continue to make sure we have better processes in place, it could all fall through the cracks."

Back in Durham, the door swings open at exactly seven a.m. Customers stream into Rise, some of them regulars whom the staff recognizes and greets. They buy the day's first donuts and biscuits.

In the back, Bethany Conver keeps cooking, making sure the supply is built to last.

This article appeared in print with the headline "Proof of Concept"