While it hardly feels like a brand booster to have your product featured as a vector for a virus, that’s exactly what happened to Delmarva’s Sandy Pony Donuts when their confections were featured in the premiere episode of Vince Gilligan’s Pluribus, currently streaming on Apple TV.
Sandy Pony owners Ben and Brea Wang were first approached by the showrunners about 18 months ago, asking if they’d be interested in supplying doughnuts for a pivotal scene in the sci-fi drama, in which the world’s population mysteriously morphs into a happy hive mind.
Much of the show is set in Gilligan’s beloved Albuquerque (the setting for his hits Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul), but some of the scenes, involving some sort of shadowy government lab, take place in the Annapolis area.
Although the scenes were shot in Albuquerque, Gilligan wanted to support a business in the Annapolis area. When he’d read how Sandy Donuts was born, he was taken with their upstart story (and likely their branding, featuring brightly colored teal boxes)
Brea was working at NASA as a graphic designer, while Ben, who likes to bake, was in construction. Tired of the nine-to-five, Brea came up with the idea of doing a doughnut food truck, which the couple first launched in Chincoteague (hence the name, a reference to the island’s wild ponies).The shop now has five brick-and-mortar locations, including Annapolis, Bethany, and Dewey Beach.
When the call from showrunners came, Ben, who was already an avowed Breaking Bad fan, couldn’t have been more excited.
While they couldn’t reveal the exact plot of the show, “They told me, ‘Something happens to people. We can’t tell you what it is, good or bad, but we have to let you know and we need you to sign some paperwork.” Ben was all too familiar with the dark nature of Gilligan’s shows, but he was too tickled to care. “I don’t care if my donuts kill characters in the show,” he said, only half joking.
When filming started, Ben shipped the doughnuts to the Albuquerque set two dozen at a time over several weeks. In all, he shipped some hundred dozen doughnuts to New Mexico. Ben was also offered the opportunity to make them on set, but he declined, due to the work entailed in running their small family business.
Making the doughnuts was business as usual, but shipping them, which took him five to six hours, was a real challenge.
“We spent an entire day frying, glazing, and carefully packing box after box, making sure every donut would arrive looking—and tasting—perfect,” says Ben.
In the doughnuts’ starring scene, a woman is seen meticulously licking each and every so-called “Ms. Sandy” glazed donut tucked inside some five or six dozen boxes splayed open across the counter of a government building. The character licks the fried dough rounds, then places them back in the box, their surfaces slathered in her (virus-ridden) saliva. A sign below the boxes depicts a smiley face that reads, “Help Yourself!”
“If you watch the scene, they did the placement exactly how we line them up,” says Ben. “We line them up like a checkerboard in the box to make it fit. And when they open the box, and even how [the character] grabbed them, was exactly how you’d get them in the store. To me, that was like the coolest part. I didn’t request that, it was just so meaningful.”
After the trailer for the series ran, including a split second shot of the bakery box, the shop was flooded with calls, from Romania to Kuwait. And while the doughnut shop can’t ship their sweets worldwide, they can ship Pluribus-themed T-shirts and other swag.
Sandy Pony celebrates its 10th anniversary this year. “It couldn’t have been better timing to have this happen,” says Ben. “It’s been surreal.”