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The Scone Goddess, a Northport-based bakery, has expanded into a new space in Belfast, where it will manufacture its scone mixes that are sold online and at dozens of specialty food stores.
It’s a full-circle moment for a business that got its start at the United Farmers Market of Maine in downtown Belfast.
“The little business that was never even supposed to be a business outgrew its space,” said Vee Stubbs, the company’s owner.
The new, 2,000-square-foot space is strictly a production facility — people looking for a fresh-baked scone can get it at the Northport bakery, Stubbs said.
Standing among recently delivered pallets of flour, sugar and other ingredients in the new space, Stubbs said she never expected the mixes to be such a big part of her business.
She actually didn’t intend to start a business at all.
After years of vacationing in Maine, Stubbs and her family moved to Northport from Vermont in 2017. But two years later, they still hadn’t met many people. Stubbs’s husband had an idea of how to fix that.
“He said, ‘You know what? We love the Saturday farmers market. Why don’t you bake some scones and have a booth there and you’ll meet people.’”
Stubbs first started baking scones when she ran a bread and breakfast in Vermont. She set up a booth at the market. Her youngest daughter, who was 10 at the time, would come with her and hand out free samples.
Even people who didn’t think they liked scones had trouble saying no to a cute kid, Stubbs said.
“We were blown away by how popular they were.” she said.
Stubbs always had a few mixes on hand at the farmers market, but they weren’t big sellers. People would say, “Oh no, we don’t want to make them, we want you to make them,” Stubbs said.
Then the pandemic hit. People started emailing Stubbs asking for scones. She offered them the mixes, which require only heavy cream.
“Everybody during the pandemic was becoming a baker again,” Stubbs said. “So it was really fabulous for our business.”
The mixes took off fast — in the first year of selling them Stubbs sold $125,000 worth.
As the pandemic loosened its grip, she used the profits from the mixes to buy a food truck, which she parked outside of the Bayside Store in the summer of 2021.
In the fall, Stubbs started building a bakery about a half-mile up the road, which opened in December 2021.
To help grow her business, Stubbs got a $100,000 block grant from the federal government, which was sponsored by the town of Northport. A grant from the state’s Maine Made program, which is part of the Department of Economic & Community Development, helped fund some digital media and trade shows.
In August, Stubbs realized the mix operation had outgrown her Northport space.
But she couldn’t find anything nearby, so she temporarily moved production to a manufacturer in New York. For two months, the company shipped her mixes to her shop in Maine. It didn’t sit well with Stubbs, so she decided that even if she had to rent a space in Bangor or Lewiston, she would do it.
“Finally I said, ‘you know, it doesn’t matter if I have to go to Bangor. We’re going to move everything back to Maine. We’re a Maine made company and I want to bring it back.’”
Soon after she made the decision, the commercial space on Waldo Avenue in Belfast came up for rent on Craigslist.
Stubbs has already hired two new employees to work at the Belfast facility and intends to hire two to three more.
She plans to continue growing her scone mix sales gradually, and retain a focus on specialty stores.
“We’re not looking for the giant stores where you can go in and buy flashlights and scone mix and underwear,” she said.
Stubbs, who has worked jobs ranging from radio DJ to sales, was working as a makeup artist in Vermont about 25 years ago when she got a gig doing makeup for a cooking show episode that featured Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, the founders of Ben & Jerry’s.
Their generous, joyful approach to business inspired her then, and guides her scone business today.
“We always say we’re the Ben & Jerry’s of scones,” she said. “We’ve got over 20 flavors of mixes. Our bakery has over 85 flavors of fresh baked scones, and they’re all full of chunks. We never short you on any of the good stuff.”
“It’s supposed to be fun,” she said.