Waiting in line to buy freshly made donuts and a cup of coffee at the Oak Park Farmers’ Market is a time-honored tradition.
Few of us think about the 40 or so volunteers who get up before the crack of dawn to make the batter, fry the donuts, dip them in cinnamon or powdered sugar, and pack them in boxes to be sold that morning.
It takes a small army to run this impressive operation that makes and sells 6,000 donuts each Saturday during the summer. Volunteer donut chair Leslie Sutphen oversees the whole operation.
The credit goes to three guys who belonged to Pilgrim Congregational Church back in the early 1980s. They came up with the idea as a way to help boost the church. The church had leased its expansive parking lot to the village as the site for the Oak Park Farmers’ Market just a few years prior. The partnership worked well for both the village and the church.
The church’s membership had dwindled to a few dozen families by the early 1980s. One Saturday morning, three entrepreneurial-minded members of the congregation brought a couple of Fry-Daddies and some boxes of Bisquick to make donuts to sell at the market. They sold about $30 worth of donuts that day.
Eventually, word got out and the idea of getting a donut and a cup of coffee at the market took off, according to Andy Houha, a church member and leader in the donut-making operation these days.
“The congregation realized this could become a serious revenue stream and looked into how professional bakeries made their donuts,” he says. “They bought a kettle fryer, this 35 by 36 size frying tub, and settled on a supplier to buy a commercial donut mix and all the sugars and frying oils. Using the new machinery, we started making a lot of donuts!”
The enterprise grew exponentially. The congregation had a large corps of its own members who began work in the wee hours of the morning, mixing the batter, revving up the machinery, making donuts, and adding the cinnamon and powdered sugar.
Eventually, the church leadership came up with the idea of partnering with local nonprofits to give them a chance to staff the donut-making operation with its own corps of volunteers and share in the profits. The idea took off.
“Three out of four Saturdays nonprofit groups provide the labor and produce the donuts and coffee,” says Houha, who is one of a dozen church volunteers who oversee operations when local nonprofits are on duty. “We share with our partners one third of the revenue. We get inquiries all the time from local groups that are interested in taking a shift to make donuts.”
While the donut-making production is a major effort for church and local groups that participate, the end result is so appreciated each time a marketgoer or their little child bites into a freshly made donut. It just doesn’t get any better!