Meet the member:
Chloe Milne – Fisher & Donaldson

My Great Grandfather Alexander Milne, was orphaned in the war. His uncle, Willie Fisher took him under his wing and he became involved in the family business from a young age.

My brother Ben, sister Jade & I took over from our late Uncle Sandy who retired after our 100th anniversary & our Dad Eric, who is trying to retire but still juggling some commitments like judging our annual staff bake-off!

Our staff, carefully expanding the range & never compromising on quality. We’re a constant, always there at every celebration (‘there’s no celebration without cake’ as the saying goes). Our customers have grown up with us and we’re honoured to be part of their celebrations. We offer a touch of nostalgia that’s comforting and invokes lots of happy memories while at the same time making lots more! Our customer loyalty cards go down a treat too!

We have 7 shops across St Andrews, Cupar & Dundee. Two are takeaway only, one standalone café, four have tea rooms and then there’s the bakery itself. We also have 15 instore concessions, mostly within Greens stores.

Consistency is a huge part of our appeal. We make quality food and we’ve always made everything daily, by hand in Fife. We use local ingredients as much as possible including flour from Carr’s in Kirkcaldy, strawberries from Fife (when in season), milk from Grahams and we use over 100 tonnes of Fife oats each year. The main exception is the French flour we import for our artisan baguettes.

Our Grandad expanded the range to include coffee & chocolate amongst other things. Our Grandma (Audrey Milne) asked him to make a Choux bun with coffee cream, which he said would never sell – it’s our second best-selling product today!
In addition to the traditional & artisan breads, pies, sausage rolls, Bridies, and our famous fudge doughnut, we also produce multi-award-winning oatcakes, shortbread biscuits, Belgian chocolates and don’t forget the Frog cakes!

Our vans deliver to businesses across Fife, Dundee, Perth, Edinburgh, Aberdeen & in between. (Anyone interested in stocking a selection of our products can call or email and we can see about adding them to one of our routes)

In addition to our wholesale business, we also work with St Andrew’s University to run ‘Love from Home’, which is a really lovely concept enabling parents to buy hampers & birthday cakes for delivery to students in Halls of Residence. We also cater for the university’s garden parties & graduation ceremonies. We build a giant doughnut wall for the Graduation Ball each year!

We have an absolutely amazing team across all areas of our business. At our staff party in 2022 we awarded long service medals for the first time, with several members having been with us over 30 years. Lynn the ‘Sausage Roll Queen’ has been here for an incredible 45 years! She’s thankfully sharing her baking wisdom with some of her colleagues so it’s not lost if/when she retires. We even have multiple generations of different families working with us.

I believe that being an open and honest employer is important, and working to empower our managers to lead their teams has been a vial learning curve that we have been working through. Recognising good work and creating strong teams is crucial.

Yes! For the World’s Largest Doughnut Wall – in celebration of our 100^th Anniversary. It contained over 1000 donuts and was unveiled on St Andrews Day as part of The Big Hoolie.

Our best seller is the fudge doughnut but at the minute our Belgian biscuits are my favourite (the range is pretty big so it changes!).

I’m more of a savoury than sweet person so I’d always opt for a cheese course, than sweet dessert, so I eat a lot of our oatcakes. I absolutely love our Belgian chocolates too!

It’s a really exciting time for us with lots going on behind the scenes including refits for 5 of the 7 shops and cafes on the cards. We’re proud to be such a well-established part of the community & as Retail Director I’m very honoured to be a custodian of such a fun family business, which will eventually pass on to the next generation.