When the pandemic dried up Tammy Levent’s travel business, she didn’t let it discourage her. It’s not like that was the biggest trouble she’s ever had in life.
A partial list includes: growing up with an emotionally abusive father, surviving cancer and witnessing her husband take a beating during an armed robbery of their jewelry store that left him with brain damage.
Next to those, what is a career switch into the doughnut hole business?
Only these aren’t just any doughnut holes. They’re loukoumades, a Greek pastry fried until the interior is soft and pillowy but the surface is crisp – the better to stand up to the honey-cinnamon glaze that confers its distinctive sweetness.
Levent's main business was running her own travel agency. She and her husband had a side hustle with a food truck selling loukoumades, which they called Heavenly Puffs, in and around Tampa. Once their travel business declined, their side hustle became their main one. Then came the scaleup.
It started with a friend who owned a restaurant where Levent’s food truck had delivered loukoumades for New Year’s. The friend told her in passing that if she could make them frozen for foodservice, she should.
Levent looked around and found only one potential competitor, whose so-called loukoumades, in her words, “tasted like a crappy doughnut.” She started making them in March of 2020 but quickly found it was not so easy – it took until June for her to perfect the recipe.
“Every day, I was making 500 to 700 of them and just throwing them out,” she says. “It was extremely hard. The yeast and the freezer don’t work together.” But she finally came up with a viable formula, and started approaching restaurants with samples.
They were an immediate success in terms of generating orders, leaving Levent with the classic entrepreneur’s dilemma: how to scale up. Her truck and the commissary kitchen she had been working with didn’t have enough capacity.
In September, they rented kitchen space from a caterer whose business had been hit by the pandemic. So far, Levent estimates what she’s sold more than 1.5 million loukoumades balls. The business is now evenly divided between foodservice and retail; the latter includes 10 pallets to a Canadian food retailer to be sold under the retailer’s store brand.
Like doughnuts, loukoumades are usually deep-fried. But home cooks can cook them in oil in a saucepan or air-fry them, and they’ll come out just as crisp on the outside as from a commercial deep-fryer.
“I was told, you can’t do both – you can’t do foodservice and retail. I said, don’t tell me what I can’t do.”
Her workday starts at 4:30 a.m. She and her crew of 15, about six of whom are full-time, mix bowls of dough for 600 to 900 pieces every 15 minutes. The dry ingredients come pre-mixed from a co-packer whom she’s been using for about five months, making production much easier.
The dough gets fed into equipment that spins it into balls and fries them. They are packaged by hand, allowing each piece to be weighed and inspected. “We first did them by machine and then realized, it’s just weighing. It’s not looking at the product for quality control.” They’re now looking for a co-packer to handle their potential higher volume.
Right now, one of her biggest challenges is sourcing basic ingredients. “All of a sudden, it’s like, we don’t have flour, we don’t have yeast. This blows me away, because I thought we were done with all that.”
The problems she’s dealt with throughout her life have helped her achieve the focus she needs as an entrepreneur.
“There’s nothing stopping me,” she says. “I’m focused and determined to do what I need to do with my vision.”
