THE ART OF DELICIOUS MARKETING
COPS... a religious experience? Where food and art collide? Maybe.
There’s nothing I distrust more than a gluttonous dinner menu. What do you mean you’ve mastered 30 entrées—all to perfection? And that’s before we even get to the appetizers or dessert? No. A perfect menu is simple. Precise. Five options or fewer and I’m listening. Three? Ding ding ding. Order up.
As I enter my 30s, I’m retiring the more-is-more mentality in favor of refinement. Why submit myself to a deluge of half-baked choices when I could go somewhere that specializes in just three? I’ll take that bet every time. Those three will almost certainly be the best things on the menu.
Which brings me to my conversation with Alexander White, founder of COPS and an expert in delicious marketing (my words, not his). His philosophy is quite literally baked into the brand’s DNA. “Art Worth Eating is our operating system,” he tells me. “Everything we do must pass through this filter.”
At COPS, you get just three options… that’s it. There’s something quiet radical about that kind of restraint. Rather than offering you everything, White offers something else entirely: an experience. “In this day and age, we’re all so overstimulated and getting screamed at from every direction,” he adds. White and I are of one mind.
If you’re building a brand—or thinking about starting one—White’s approach might feel like a minor salvation. Take notes. If you’re just here for the doughnuts, there are plenty of images that will make you hungry. Either way, you’re in for a treat.
Questions and responses have been edited for length and clarity.
You’re from Australia but the brand took hold in Toronto, and now you’re in New York. What’s your story and the impetus for the brand because doughnuts is quite peculiar for an entrepreneur?
I moved from Australia to Toronto for love. I worked in the coffee industry for a number of years, then at 26 launched a brunch restaurant in 2016. It was my first business and was quite complex to operate, so I wanted to come up with something simpler and more scalable that could grow organically whilst maintaining brand integrity.
I guess I’m wondering why food though? You could have chosen anything—but working in the coffee industry, starting a restaurant, those are all quite interesting avenues for an entrepreneur. All focused in hospitality.
I saw a huge gap in the market for Aussie brunch style cafes. In Australia, it’s typical for cafes to serve made to order breakfast and lunch. But in North America, and Toronto especially, cafes only had baked goods or pre-made sandwiches sitting in a fridge. So this was the gateway. I worked in various coffee shops as a barista as soon as I landed. I gained the experience, but I had the knowledge of what I was used to back in Aus.
So then you started COPS?
I first had the idea back in 2017, purely based on the cheeky reference to the long-standing association between law enforcement and doughnuts. We worked with a fine dining chef and food scientist on the base recipe and knew we were on to something.
A food scientist? I’ve never heard that term before.
I hadn’t before either, but as luck would have it, the mom of one of our employees at the time was a food scientist at a large baked goods factory. She worked on the “DNA" and makeup of the items from a scientific perspective. Altering certain ingredient ratios and tweaking our recipe to get it just right. So she worked in tandem to lock in our recipe.
Though doughnuts are the vessel, our ethos is really about creating Art Worth Eating. The closest comparison would be something like Red Bull, a platform for ideas and championing extreme sports athletes—Far more than just an energy drink. COPS is a platform for creatives to express ideas through an edible medium in a disruptive and unexpected way. In that sense, the doughnuts themselves are an everyday luxury—an entry point into our universe.
When did you know you were on to something? The “aha” moment when things started to click?
It was definitely during COVID. My brunch restaurant got knee capped with no indoor dining for a year. With everyone stuck at home and online, fresh doughnuts delivered blew up. So I’d say it was around this time that COPS started to become much more of an institution in Toronto.
COPS moved from being a nice treat to becoming synonymous with our customers most prized moments and occasions big and small. Birthdays, anniversaries, engagements, boring office meetings, mourning the finale of a Netflix series and so on.
There’s definitely a visceral emotional awakening when a customer sees a box of COPS after having experienced it before. Their eyes light up. I’m humbled by that and think it’s really special.
It’s funny, I have such nostalgia of my grandfather sharing the experience of black coffee and a doughnut in the morning. That’s something you do as well—”MINIMAL BY DESIGN” your site says. What’s the reason behind that?
Minimal by design would speak to our approach to simplicity. Our old tagline used to be the popular adage “too many options are a prison,” which I truly believe. In this day and age we’re all so overstimulated and getting screamed at from ads in every direction. I wanted COPS to feel like a breath of fresh air, making decisions easy vs offering 100 options like a traditional shop. We’re probably less the classic black-coffee-and-breakfast doughnut ritual your grandfather had, and more the late-night craving go-to—the box that shows up when people want to make a moment feel a bit more special.
That being said, there’s true complexity in executing anything that seems simple over and over again on a consistent basis. I’m not going to lie, when I got into this I had no idea how complex the science of baking. There’s been a tonne of learning over the years, I’ve never stopped learning.
Are you self-taught, or you went to culinary school? You mention starting the restaurant so I’m just curious.
I never went to culinary school, I studied Fashion Business in Australia. It was really just the concept that I wanted to run with and I was able to find some great minds to work with on the product and recipes. I definitely lean more into the creative and brand side vs the operations side. I love curating and building something so unconventional.
Our menu is very tight. We only ever offer three flavors; cinnamon sugar, a sour cream original glaze flavor, and a rotating weekly feature. We use the weekly feature as a way to partner with creatives and artists. Any collab glaze or partnership we do will typically only last for a week then it’s gone perhaps forever.
Your visuals are incredibly striking, and a bit radical. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen someone approach marketing and branding the way you do, at least not with food. How did you know it would work, or was it a leap of faith?
Did I know it would work? Absolutely not. COPS has become more of a personal portfolio and collaboration engine to execute ideas with people and brands that I personally love. So working in the sense of we are having fun doing something different and obscure, definitely. We are attempting to blur the lines between fashion, art, design and hospitality in a way that seems unconventional. There’s no blueprint for this.
I’m starting to understand the connection to your early note about Red Bull’s marketing. For them, there’s a through-line from their product to the daredevil (not that that’s their actual audience). For you, it’s perhaps a critique; someone who understands the connections between art, culture, and commerce. Do I have that right? Or maybe I’m drawing my own conclusions.
For me, the Red Bull analogy is mostly about the gateway—the drink being the entry point into the rest of their world.
With COPS, the doughnuts work the same way. They’re a proxy that lets us partner with different creatives through an edible medium. The key difference is that Red Bull tends to operate adjacent to their athletes, whereas we pull collaborators directly into our world, so the whole thing just keeps building on itself.
Art Worth Eating is our operating system. Everything we do must pass through this filter. Beyond food, I believe that we consume through all five of our senses. We partner with spatial designers on one-of-a-kind modular event installations that become rentable experiences for future events. Fashion designers on custom uniforms. Michelin-star chefs on glazes inspired by their most popular desserts. We’ll execute visually subversive marketing campaigns and so on.
That point on collaborating with artists, chefs, and creators—How do you know when those partnerships make sense for the brand?
We’ve been intentional about only doing partnerships we genuinely want to do and are excited about. We’ve had to turn down many requests due to the off-brand nature or lack of creative freedom. We work with creatives that we respect and resonate with what they’re doing and feel that inviting them into our universe makes sense, our creative portfolio with all of our collaborators is for the most part curated by us in-house.
From artists like PinkPantheress to more local creatives we admire. It’s not about how big someone is. If someone has 100M followers on IG but is off brand and refuses to give us creative flexibility with a campaign or idea then it’s just not the right fit. It definitely doesn’t mean we only work with “cool” people or brands. The crux is that we have significant input into the story telling and expression of the idea.
I think the gritty luxury energy we’ve built attracts the right types of partners that want to work together to create something fresh and bold that neither of us could do ourselves—which is the core foundation of a collaboration in the first place. A lot of the time I will just reach out to a creative or brand and pitch them on an idea and then from there we get cooking.
What does the future of COPS look like?
I’d love for COPS to be integrated into global creative moments, NYFW, PFW, Art Basel, Frieze and so on. I would also love for select partnerships to have a collaborative artifact of sorts that drops the same time as the glaze. We’ve never really sold anything outside of the doughnuts, so I could see us working on fun projects with our partners to have limited edition pieces beyond the doughnuts.
Experimental flavors you have yet to try that you've been lingering on? Or, your favorite creation to date? (or both)
One future collaborator wanted to experiment with some iconic NY flavors that I can’t say just yet but they are fun and unconventional. One of the glazes we did with a Michelin restaurant in Toronto, Quetzal was one of my favorites. Nicuatole, a traditional Oaxacan coconut based desert with charred pineapple and hibiscus flower meringue. It was unbelievable.
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