We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Katie And Dominic Galto. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Katie and Dominic below.

Katie and Dominic, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. So, what do you think about family businesses? Would you want your children or other family members to one day join your business?

I think we can easily say that Joe & Dough is the very definition of a family business. We are a husband and wife team and kind of pride ourselves on that. A lot of people make comments like “you guys like each other THAT much to be able to spend that much time together?” and the answer is an easy yes. Like all families, we definitely have our days but we truly could not imagine it any other way.

When we first started Joe & Dough, we not only wanted to be a part of our community in a bigger way, but we also wanted our business to feel community centered. We wanted our customers to see and feel that we are family run. To us, that means that when you come up to our trailer, it could be one of us, or it could be one (or both) of our young daughters greeting you and taking your order. It could also be in the branding decisions that we’ve made together that everyone loves so much. Or our family members who watch our girls while we’re at bigger events. All the way down to the coffee that we serve, who also happens to be our neighbor, and another beloved family run business.

We love getting to see our regulars (that are almost always families!) every week at the farmers market, remembering names or big life events and sometimes getting to actually be a part of those big life events.

Every part of our business is family oriented in some shape or form and we hope that shows!

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

We are Joe & Dough: a cute little mint green trailer that serves fresh, warm made-to-order mini doughnuts and locally roasted coffee (Hi, Heady Cup!). We’re based in Crystal Lake, IL (although we were both born and raised in Berwyn, IL!) and lovingly get referred to as “the doughnut guy”, “the doughnut girl” and/or “the doughnut house” a lot more often than we ever could’ve ever imagined.

As we mentioned, we are a husband and wife team with a major love for our community. Our first event ever was in January of 2021, for a local high school that our neighbor worked for at the time and we became an instant hit with the school community. Every time we served at an event, we were getting three more inquiries in our inbox, it was amazing. We were so well received so fast and are truly just so grateful that the community that we love, love us right back.

We still do events for a LOT of schools but our repertoire has grown quite a bit. Now we do weddings (usually booked as a late night snack which is soooo fun!), birthday parties, and have even gotten the opportunity to work with some bigger companies like Disney and Netflix.

Our menu is quite small, only offering two different types of doughnut toppings (powdered sugar and cinnamon sugar!) and coffee! Depending on the time of year, we may also serve hot chocolate or iced drinks like chai, lemonade and iced coffee. Sometimes we add different menu items but we always come back to the classics. They are our most beloved! Most recently we’ve added tiramisu to our menu which was an instant favorite and we do have other plans in the works to bring our doughnuts to more places in a different capacity (we know, we know, so secretive!) so stay tuned for that!

In the summertime you can find us at the Palatine Farmers Market in Palatine, IL on Saturday mornings otherwise the best way to find out where we’ll be is on the calendar on our website or our instagram account (when we remember to post 🤪).

One of our favorite things about Joe & Dough are all of the people we get to meet and interact with every single day!! We are very proud of and incredibly grateful for the community that we’ve amassed in such a small amount of time and are very excited for where this little dream of ours will take us in the future!

What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?

Our customers are the most important and cherished thing about Joe & Dough. We love those connections and try our hardest to remember names and faces and what they order. We try to remember the conversations that we have with them or note certain events that they tell us about so that when they come back to visit us, we can connect with them and ask questions based on past conversations. We have the best of the best and we truly pride ourselves on how many events we’ve been booked for because of word of mouth from our customers. When it comes to our reputation, we just hope that we’re being known as the brand that prioritizes that connection over everything else.

Okay – so how did you figure out the manufacturing part? Did you have prior experience?

When it comes to our doughnuts, we don’t make our own mix! We have a manufacturer that we order from in MN, who specialized in doughnuts based on our doughnut machine. That was the easy part, actually. When we actually started having to make the mix and figure out water to mix ratios, that was a little bit harder. One of the biggest things we learned is that temperature really matters! If it’s a hot day, we’re adding less water but in the winter we’re adding more and our water is always always always on the warmer side before we add it to our mix. Thankfully we figured that out pretty early on, ensuring the fluffiest doughnuts, not matter the weather!

Our second biggest product is our coffee. When we first started out, we were using Starbucks but knew that we did NOT want to use them long term. It was really important for us to use a local roaster. We used a different roaster for about a year until we were approached by a guy named Mike who was just starting his coffee business, Heady Cup Coffee Roasters, and was also craving that local community collaboration. Not only did we hit it off pretty quickly but they were offering a great product, to boot! We learned so much about coffee so fast, including getting that perfect grind size, and how important it is to use specific brands of water to get that same delicious cup every single time. We started off by serving their most popular blend (Flo!) but now we have our very own Joe & Dough blend that we’re very proud of! We get compliments on our coffee all the time and loooooove when people come back for seconds (and sometimes thirds– we don’t judge!).

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.joendough.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/joendoughco
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/joendoughco
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/joe-dough-crystal-lake
• Other: Email address: [email protected]