Since the pandemic, several quick-service concepts have found great value in the third-party aggregator channel. You can count Magnolia Bakery, a New York City bakeshop known for its world-famous banana pudding, as one of those finding great success.

In a unique collaboration, the brand launched an exclusive new flavor—Banana Pudding with Peanut Butter, Chocolate Chunks, and Chocolate Cookie Pieces—available only through DoorDash’s DashMart platform, which operates as a virtual grocery store for customers nationwide.

The company first partnered with DoorDash in March 2023 when it began selling Confetti Banana Pudding Cookies on DashMart, and it’s seen compelling sales since then.

Magnolia Bakery chief commercial officer Eddie Revis recently sat down with QSR magazine to discuss how this DoorDash partnership has redefined the brand’s reach, the challenges of integrating with new platforms, and what the future holds for Magnolia Bakery as it continues to innovate and support customers through collaborations like this one.

What motivated Magnolia Bakery to partner with DoorDash, and how has this partnership contributed to the company’s growth over the past 18 months?

So we at Magnolia Bakery, over the last 18 months, we do a lot of work with our customers, especially as we’ve expanded our offering outside of the bakeries. So we launched our banana pudding cookies in grocery retail in March of last year. DoorDash was a significant customer of ours for that and continues to be a significant customer of ours for that. And so as we started to see the strength and the power of their platform and their reach to hundreds of millions of people in the U.S., it really made sense for us to spend time getting to know them as a partner, spend time to understand their channels and their shopper and really think about what else could we do to solidify and just make the partnership that we have with them really special. And we do this with a lot of our customers in retail grocery, especially as our brand expands into those new channels. You’ll see more of this from us with other partners, but we love being able to do it with DoorDash and the first time we did something like this.

What have been some of the challenges Magnolia Bakery faced while integrating with a platform like DoorDash, and how were they overcome?

In relation to this partnership specifically, we are working with DoorDash to distribute our products through their channels like DashMart. And so it’s really allowing us to not only create this great exclusive pudding for them but be able to expand it nationwide using their systems, their channels, their infrastructure. So it’s a little bit different than like a third-party delivery with DoorDash, which is, you get on the app in New York City and you place an order for a dasher to deliver it from a bakery.

This is a little bit more like a traditional retail grocery partnership where we’re leveraging the power of DoorDash and the systems and the infrastructure of DoorDash to expand our products nationwide into their fulfillment centers so we can get out to people, state to state to coast to coast. So it’s one of those really cool things about DoorDash and all of the different products that they offer merchants like us and ways to expand our brand and grow with them. I think a lot of people just think of them as like a third-party delivery. But we were able to really sit down with them and say, ‘How do we use the best of DoorDash and your infrastructure and your systems, along with the best of Magnolia Bakery—which is of course is our desserts—to create a really special partnership that we could take nationwide?’

Does demand for product play any factor in how Magnolia Bakery thinks about its future growth strategy?

I think that we’ve been really excited by the insights that we’ve gotten around where our fans are in relation to our current bakery system in the U.S. We have New York City, we have Chicago, and we have Los Angeles. But there’s definitely been, I’d say, pleasant surprises in the velocities and in the product performance in some key markets that demonstrate the power of our brand and where they’re at. Our top markets a lot of times are places where we don’t have bakeries right now. I’ll say it like that. Which is really exciting because it just means there’s demand out there for our products and for our brand, and not everybody can always get on a flight to New York City or Chicago or L.A. on a whim if you’re really craving a a Magnolia Bakery dessert. And so this really allows us to take Magnolia Bakery into more places to meet that demand for those consumers, wherever they may be from, Middle America to the coast, to the South, to the Southwest and Southeast. We’ve definitely been really surprised and excited by where our brand does really well.

Can you discuss any future plans or upcoming collaborations Magnolia Bakery is exploring to further leverage digital channels and third-party platforms?

I definitely see retail partnerships and development of either limited-time offers or exclusives as continuing this one. It was just such a tremendous collaboration with the DoorDash team. They were part of the flavor innovation. They were part of the packaging development with us. Obviously, they’re part of the distribution and marketing very closely with us. But it really was a magic, sweet collaboration between taking the power of what DoorDash can bring, taking what Magnolia Bakery can bring, and turning it into a great opportunity. So based on that, definitely more of these in the future across our portfolio of retail partners and customers. But really excited and and grateful to the DoorDash team for being the first one to try this out with us. I think we’re all really happy with performance so far.