How the Subsequent Technology Is Sporting at the Custom of Cambodian-Owned Doughnut Stores in Southern California

It took two years for Danette Kuoch to persuade her oldsters to start accepting bank cards at California Donuts, her circle of relatives’s 40-year-old doughnut store on 3rd Side road in Koreatown. Subsequent got here new toppings and fillings, like Fruity Pebbles and entire Snickers bars, a departure from the store’s vintage sugared rings, glazed twists, and craggy buttermilk bars. Launching a social media account quickly adopted, and designing branded packing containers and luggage now not lengthy after. Since becoming a member of the circle of relatives enterprise in 2003, Kuoch, together with her more youthful sister Stephanie Kudo, have tripled California Donuts’s gross sales, collected 365,000 Instagram fans, and made their circle of relatives’s humble store stand out within the Southland’s crowded doughnut marketplace. The store’s runaway luck gave their oldsters — Cambodian refugees who escaped the Khmer Rouge, mastered the doughnut business, and raised their households inside of their retail outlets’ 4 partitions — the assurance that they had to after all retire in 2020 and to go away the enterprise of their daughters’ arms.

Meet the “doughnut youngsters,” second-generation Cambodian American citizens who grew up bathing in industrial kitchen sinks as young children, promoting lottery tickets after faculty, and folding never-ending stacks of crimson packing containers right through summer season breaks. This new elegance of doughnut marketers witnessed their oldsters operating early mornings and overdue nights, seven days per week — and internalized each the struggles and successes of operating a small circle of relatives enterprise.

With minimum startup prices and little English talent required, running doughnut retail outlets gave Cambodian refugees a foothold within the American economic system within the ’70s and ’80s. Ted Ngoy, whose lifestyles was once memorialized within the 2020 documentary The Donut King, discovered the bits and bobs of the doughnut enterprise by way of enrolling within the manager-training program at Winchell’s after fleeing Phnom Penh in 1975. He helped to popularize the business throughout the Cambodian American group, developing a limiteless community of independently owned doughnut retail outlets that experience proved to be ambitious competition to nationwide chains. It’s estimated that more or less 80 % of Southern California’s doughnut retail outlets are Cambodian-owned.

Because the retirement-age homeowners of Los Angeles’s cherished doughnut retail outlets develop waiting to hold up their aprons, some doughnut youngsters, like Kuoch and Kudo, are keen to hold on their circle of relatives’s enterprise and turn out to be it right into a family identify. Different second-generation youngsters, alternatively, grapple with how their circle of relatives’s tough mom-and-pop retail outlets are compatible into their busy lives. Those retail outlets, running in just about each strip mall around the town, verify that doughnuts are an indelible a part of Angeleno meals tradition — steeped in its economic system, its historical past, and its panorama. However the way forward for LA’s doughnut retail outlets, it sort of feels, rests within the arms of the following era — an inflection level which can alternate how those companies perform, keep related, and continue to exist shifting ahead.

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The very last thing Kuoch and Kudo’s oldsters sought after was once for his or her daughters to paintings along them at California Donuts. Their oldsters emphasised the significance of schooling and requested them to try towards one thing “quote-unquote ‘higher,’” Kudo says, now not understanding that Kuoch and Kudo thought to be the paintings of operating the store now not most effective precious however a solution to honor the sacrifices their oldsters made after immigrating to The us to provide them extra alternatives. Despite their oldsters’ chronic push towards careers past doughnuts, the 2 sisters discovered their as far back as the enterprise after making an attempt their arms at different interests.

Kuoch, who labored for a couple of firms all through faculty, recollects the instant when she made up our minds to devote her occupation to her circle of relatives’s enterprise. “Any individual in school mentioned one thing alongside the strains of, ‘Why did you move to school when you’re simply going to paintings at a doughnut store?’ That lit a fireplace in me,” she says. Kuoch returned to California Donuts instantly after completing her level in enterprise control from Cal State Fullerton. “I simply learned that I will be able to proceed to paintings for someone else and make allowance them to pressure great fancy automobiles or I will be able to do it for my oldsters,” she says.

Kudo introduced her personal clothes line earlier than becoming a member of her sister and fogeys a decade in the past at California Donuts when gross sales skyrocketed as the results of her sister’s advertising and marketing efforts. “When my sister and I began truly coming into the enterprise, I bear in mind my mother pronouncing that she by no means truly sought after us to paintings as demanding as she did,” says Kudo. “It was once a professional and a con, like she was once truly proud that we joined the circle of relatives enterprise, however on the identical time it more or less harm her to have to look us paintings lengthy hours as effectively.”

Passing alongside the circle of relatives enterprise was once by no means a part of the plan for lots of ageing oldsters of doughnut youngsters. “I don’t assume a large number of doughnut oldsters need their youngsters to be within the doughnut enterprise as it’s a difficult lifestyles — it truly is,” says Adam Vaun, who took over his circle of relatives’s enterprise, DK’s Donuts in Orange, in 2007. “I had an epiphany the place I used to be identical to, my oldsters are growing older and I’m gonna need to truly step up simply to make certain that they’re sorted.”

For Mayly Tao, operating at DK’s Donuts in Santa Monica (unrelated to DK’s Donuts in Orange) was once extra about practicality than interest to start with. Despite the fact that she lent a hand on the store on weekends whilst attending faculty in San Diego, she most effective returned after graduating from faculty in 2012 because of slim occupation possibilities. “I simply felt so defeated coming again,” she says. “However as I began to paintings my standard shifts, I in truth had a unique imaginative and prescient. Going to school opened my eyes to the probabilities of what this doughnut store may well be. And at that time I made up our minds, ‘Good day, you understand what? I’m going to make certain that other folks from far and wide LA and far and wide the arena know this doughnut store.’ This is my purpose.”

Trained, business-minded, and well-versed in social media and era, doughnut youngsters like Tao possess ambition that was once exceptional a era in the past. While their oldsters operated doughnut retail outlets as a method to an finish, doughnut youngsters are the use of social media to make bigger their achieve past group regulars and reworking the Southern California doughnut trade in consequence. With doughnut youngsters taking the helm — and the tandem upward push of Instagram meals tradition and connoisseur doughnuts — some mom-and-pop doughnut retail outlets remodeled reputedly in a single day into singular locations.

Crystal Quach, who grew up frosting doughnuts, brewing espresso, and promoting lottery tickets at her circle of relatives’s doughnut store Mr. Steve’s in Rosemead, encountered an identical parental pushback. Even if Quach knew from an early age that she sought after to observe in her oldsters’ entrepreneurial footsteps, they refused to entertain the theory till she graduated from Cal State Los Angeles and won some real-world enjoy. Best after checking the ones two crucial packing containers was once Quach in a position to devote herself full-time at Contemporary Donuts in Lake Perris, one among her circle of relatives’s two present doughnut retail outlets. “I all the time gravitated towards doughnuts as a result of observing my oldsters run their store, it’s greater than only a enterprise — it’s a group,” she says. After seeing her thrive amid the store’s tricky shoppers, tough inventories, or even plumbing mishaps, Quach’s oldsters gave her their blessing to open a store of her personal, Magnificence One Donuts in Glendora, in 2019.

When Quach first of all purchased the store from its proprietor of 2 years, profitable over the loyalty of regulars took effort and time. The primary six months had been “tricky” as locals adjusted to seeing a unique face and a unique array of doughnuts at the back of the counter. “We needed to maintain a detrimental vibe to start with,” she says. “However I gained them over. I discovered their names, discovered their youngsters’ names, and discovered their orders. Through the years, the regulars that had been used to the former proprietor changed into our regulars.”

Advertising and marketing was once every other large alternate for the enterprise. “You simply need to stay alongside of the days,” says Quach. “Again then, my oldsters didn’t have the option to promote it freely within the palm in their arms.” Keeping up a web-based presence assists in keeping regulars up-to-date on the newest flavors whilst attracting curious inexperienced persons, she says. Tapping into Instagram and its huge community of content material creators again in 2013 — an generation earlier than pay-to-play algorithms, paid ads, and influencer control companies — proved to be pivotal to increasing the achieve of each California Donuts and DK’s Donuts in Santa Monica. After a pal of Kuoch’s began California Donuts’ Instagram account, she “studied” intently how companies grew their audiences by way of offering loose meals to influencers. “They sought after our doughnuts on their feed and we would have liked them to submit about us, so it was once a pleasing business again within the day,” she says. “It helped us push the enterprise into the following era,” says Kudo.

Each retail outlets additionally benefited from the eye of native meals media. The Santa Monica DK’s Donuts attracted lengthy strains for years after Jeff Miller wrote about its tackle Dominique Ansel’s Cronut in Thrillist in 2013. “My mother and I in truth labored 20-hour days simply to make certain that everyone were given a contemporary Cronut,” says Tao. Crowds in a similar fashion descended on California Donuts after Kristin Hunt swooned over the store’s Snickers-stuffed doughnuts, additionally in Thrillist, a 12 months later.

Tao understood the significance of crowd pleasing branding for social media. “After I stepped in, we nonetheless had our outdated signal within the groovy ’80s font,” she says. Like many Cambodian-owned doughnut retail outlets that opened within the ’70s and ’80s, DK’s Donuts packed its dozens into undeniable crimson pastry packing containers. Despite the fact that custom designed packaging emblazoned with the store’s newly designed brand price six instances greater than the crimson ones, Tao says that in addition they served as “strolling ads.” “Now it’s aesthetically fulfilling for Instagram and to blow their own horns like, ‘Good day guys, I’m at this cool doughnut store, they make the best flavors,’” says Tao.

Lily Ung creates customized doughnut designs at her circle of relatives’s 33-year-old store Improbable Donuts, situated at the southeast fringe of Koreatown. The tale of the circle of relatives’s store is one among stark resilience: Improbable Donuts burned down right through the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion. Whilst insurance coverage coated 1 / 4 of the fee to rebuild the store, Ung’s father labored as a baker at every other doughnut store and a cook dinner at a hamburger stand to lift the remainder of the budget. Along with his decision, the store was once in a position to reopen a 12 months later.

Ung joined her father at the back of the counter in 2015 in particular to stay alongside of tendencies. “I driven this branding of spreading happiness with doughnuts as a result of I truly love when purchasers percentage our doughnuts with everybody and I truly love that response, ‘Oh my god, that is so cool, that is so other,’” she says. “I didn’t be expecting to come back again to the doughnut store however I sought after to turn [my parents] I will be able to do one thing other. I unquestionably can convey one thing to the desk with social media, with the brand new generation.” Ung plans to take over Improbable Donuts as soon as her oldsters retire within the years forward.

With masses of 1000’s of social media fans and a emerging call for for strong point doughnuts, the doughnut youngsters upload gasoline to the push by way of ceaselessly introducing unique flavors. Out-of-the-box, hard-to-get doughnuts feed completely into the rage of consuming extremely coveted meals and sharing the enjoy on-line. “Any person coined us ‘the Willy Wonka of doughnuts’ as a result of we simply have an never-ending provide of flavors,” says Kudo, who takes credit score for introducing the now-ubiquitous panda doughnut made with Oreo cookie ears to the arena.

“There have been nights the place I’d lay down to fall asleep and I’m like, ‘I gotta do this taste the next day to come,’” says Kuoch. “With that, plus social media, it simply more or less spiraled. Someday we ran out of doughnuts so early within the morning and we simply stored including increasingly and extra [to replenish].”

Tao says that previous to taking the selling reins at DK’s Donuts, the “craziest” taste the store introduced was once a cinnamon roll. She takes credit score for developing the first-ever ube-flavored doughnut in Los Angeles and single-handedly bringing the Cronut craze to the West Coast. DK’s Donuts produced over 25 other croissant-doughnut hybrids starting from Nutella to cookie butter on the peak of the Cronut phenomenon. Seeing her creations fly off the cabinets encouraged additional innovation, together with savory pizza and scorching Cheeto flavors. “It was once like a excessive particular person’s dream,” says Tao. “Folks like those bizarre, loopy flavors.”

At Knead Donuts in Lengthy Seaside, founder Huey Behuynh works intently together with his spouse, Lynn, and their 27-year-old daughter, Amy, to stay the store’s doughnut variety present and engaging. Along with riffing on flavors and types made preferred at different native retail outlets, just like the Donut Guy’s Tiger Tail and Sidecar Doughnuts’ huckleberry cake doughnut, the trio dreamed up wholly distinctive mixtures like Thai tea creme brulee, cinnamon sugar churro, or even stinky durian.

Others are giving vintage raised and glazed doughnuts a contemporary makeover by way of making use of clever designs to them. Ung started intricately icing animal-inspired doughnuts at Improbable Donuts in 2015 and has since expanded her repertoire to incorporate holiday- and character-themed doughnuts, like Easter, Pokémon, and Pac-Guy.

Linda Ngoy Cuff — who took over B.C. Donuts in Pasadena from her oldsters, letting them retire in 2017 — created a line of festive doughnuts timed with Mom’s Day and Valentine’s Day celebrations. “I’d paintings a bit additional when it got here to adorning particular issues,” she says. Whilst the monetary advantages of those efforts weren’t instantly mirrored within the store’s base line, Ngoy Cuff was once prepared to dedicate overtime adorning doughnuts so as to marketplace the enterprise otherwise and to usher in extra shoppers.

Some doughnut youngsters have even discovered a distinct segment for doughnuts past breakfast. When Tao’s oldsters at first opened their Santa Monica store, it was once basically aimed toward “the operating other folks to come back in and grasp one thing.” However now, she says, DK’s Donuts has change into a “vacation spot” in any respect hours. Kudo has additionally skilled this phenomenon: “We nonetheless have our morning rush, however it’s in truth extra busy within the night now. Everyone seems to be beginning to pop out for cakes,” she says.

Doughnut youngsters have additionally branched out into different alternatives like customized orders, together with for large-scale occasions. Doughnut letters that spell out “glad birthday” or “recover quickly” can also be ordered on-line and brought to doorsteps. The recognition of Instagrammable moments at broad gatherings like child showers and weddings resulted in doughnut retail outlets developing elaborate doughnut shows that adhered to express issues and colour schemes. Firms and picture studios hopped on board the rage by way of gifting branded doughnuts to influential tastemakers that coincided with movie or tv promotions. California Donuts, as an example, just lately partnered with Pixar to supply doughnuts adorned to seem like pink pandas as a part of a marketing campaign for the discharge of Turning Crimson.

The greater call for for doughnuts in any respect hours has additionally modified the rhythm of operating and staffing retail outlets. “When my oldsters opened [California Donuts], it was once one baker and they’d bake within the night. All of the doughnuts they’d within the morning would promote all day lengthy,” says Kudo. “Now, to create all of the flavors and the volume that we’d like, we have now a again kitchen group of workers of like 5 other folks consistent with shift. Within the entrance, my mother was the one one operating and now we have now 4 or 5 other folks within the entrance at one given shift.” Moreover, the store staffs various shift managers or even has an worker devoted to filling customized orders.

Whilst California Donuts continues to perform 24 hours an afternoon by way of juggling 3 to 4 other worker shifts, many doughnut youngsters are rethinking their hours of operation to prioritize leisure and steer clear of burnout. When Ngoy Cuff and her older siblings, Ken and Annette, took possession of B.C. Donuts, they agreed to transport clear of 24/7 operations to 6 days per week and shutting at 4 p.m. on weekdays, with even shorter hours on weekends. Their oldsters, together with just about each doughnut store proprietor in their era, stored prolonged hours for concern of lacking out on a sale, a tradition that was once pushed partly by way of a type of shortage mentality function amongst refugees. The siblings additionally scheduled time clear of the store in order that each and every particular person may have a tendency to lifestyles issues.

“I need to attend my youngsters’s faculty occasions and spend the weekend with them,” says Ngoy Cuff. “Rising up my oldsters didn’t do any of that. My brothers and sisters and I didn’t be expecting oldsters to turn up for back-to-school night time, to assist with homework. Now, it’s other.”

Along with proscribing Magnificence One Donuts’ hours to early mornings and afternoons, Quach is devoted to taking an afternoon or two off each and every week to recharge, and gives the similar alternatives to her workers, together with her husband, who give up his full-time activity within the well being care trade to run the store along her. “Leisure is so vital as a result of while you’re operating on this trade, you must be there 100% and provides your very best customer support,” she says. “[Rest is] a rarity for my circle of relatives. All my uncles and aunts and my oldsters paintings seven days directly they usually’re all the time drained. They don’t have the steadiness of playing lifestyles out of doors the doughnut store.” After seeing sturdy gross sales at Magnificence One Donuts despite lowered hours, Quach’s oldsters adopted swimsuit and restricted their retail outlets’ hours in Lake Perris and at Day-to-day Donuts in South LA; longtime shoppers have adjusted their routines to house the brand new agenda.

Despite the fact that luck and steadiness can also be satisfying for doughnut youngsters, the grueling realities of the doughnut enterprise can also be tricky to steadiness with lifestyles’s unpredictable twists. Working B.C. Donuts changed into untenable for Ngoy Cuff and her siblings when COVID hit and their father’s most cancers returned in 2020. Overseeing far off studying and spending time with an ill father or mother, all whilst ensuring the store’s workers may pay their mortgages, proved to be an excessive amount of, and the siblings made up our minds to promote the store.

“It’s a circle of relatives enterprise, however now we should be within the enterprise of what’s very best for the circle of relatives,” Ngoy Cuff says. “I used to be in tears about it, however then I mentioned to myself that these days I’m 60 % enterprise proprietor, 60 % father or mother, and 60 % being provide as a daughter for my dad when he was once in poor health and wanted me. I felt like at that time with the drive, one thing needed to give.” Their father passed on to the great beyond a month after the store was once bought in early 2021. After promoting the store, Ngoy Cuff gave beginning to her 3rd kid and relishes touring along with her siblings, which wasn’t imaginable whilst operating the doughnut store in combination.

When Tao’s mom, Cheong Pek Lee, introduced that she was once waiting to retire in 2021, Tao was once first of all shocked by way of the inside track. “This has been part of my identification, part of my lifestyles since I used to be a bit woman. It’s been one thing I view as my interest, being the doughnut princess at DK’s Donuts,” she says. Even if Tao raised the store’s native and nationwide profile and tripled the shop’s gross sales right through her tenure, Lee was once an very important piece of the puzzle when it got here to executing recipes and operating the again finish of the enterprise. “The [Cambodian] circle of relatives that purchased it will purchase any doughnut store for a cheaper price, however they sought after to shop for DK’s on account of the branding, on account of the next, on account of what’s already been arrange for them,” Tao says.

Even if Tao is now not operating DK’s Donuts day by day, her arms stay within the doughnut enterprise via her corporate Donut Princess, a carrier that gives consulting to doughnut retail outlets having a look to “alternate with the days” and to extend gross sales via branding, advertising and marketing, and social media. Tao additionally sells bespoke doughnut bouquets and hosts a podcast known as Quick N’ Candy the place she explores entrepreneurship and celebrates small companies. “Throughout my time at DK’s, I advanced plantar fasciitis from status for 20 hours an afternoon. And so now it’s all about therapeutic and ensuring that no matter enterprise I do is extra of this steadiness, there isn’t this sense of tremendous burnt out and high-stress,” she says. “My priorities have shifted as I’m growing older now and understanding that point is in truth the most important type of wealth.”

A couple of years in the past, Quach puzzled aloud to her father what would occur to all of the doughnut retail outlets as soon as their homeowners retired. ‘The brand new wave of immigrants from Cambodia are coming. We’re gonna educate them the doughnut enterprise,” Quach recollects him pronouncing. “If you happen to’re immigrating from Cambodia on this era, your alternative is the doughnut store,” she says. Quach has witnessed her father’s prediction come true, with newly immigrated family operating in doughnut retail outlets to be told the enterprise and to save cash to open retail outlets of their very own. Doughnut retail outlets alternate arms steadily throughout the native Cambodian group between new immigrants and Cambodian American citizens. Each Quach’s and Behuynh’s doughnut retail outlets had been owned by way of ready-to-retire, first-generation marketers, whilst Ngoy Cuff bought her Pasadena-based store to cousin.

Kuoch’s 3 youngsters, ranging in ages from a contemporary faculty graduate to a present highschool pupil, all have one foot out the door of California Donuts ​​— at their mom’s insistence. “Up to I need them concerned, I additionally need them to discover different choices as a result of operating a doughnut store, operating a circle of relatives enterprise, operating any enterprise is a sacrifice, and for them, they have got an opportunity at simply seeing what’s in the market,” she says.

Vaun at DK’s Donuts in Orange is these days opening a moment doughnut store known as Downtown Donuts in Brea together with a enterprise spouse. He likens the brand new store’s high-end and design-forward aesthetic to luxurious style label Louis Vuitton. “I think like my oldsters have constructed this legacy of sacrifice, blood, sweat, and tears,” he says. “I take a large number of satisfaction in proceeding their doughnut legacy as a result of that represents what came about to them in Cambodia and what they constructed right here. Our purpose is to push the doughnut trade to new heights.”

After discovering their very own voice and objective amid an older era’s American dream, doughnut youngsters are protecting, innovating on, and proceeding a uniquely Khemerican enjoy. “Even if this doughnut store won’t essentially be my dream, it’s my circle of relatives’s dream and it’s our legacy. It’s our tale,” says Kudo. Despite the fact that it’s inconceivable to are expecting the way forward for LA’s independently owned doughnut retail outlets as the following era weighs whether or not to take regulate in their circle of relatives’s enterprise, to cross at the torch, or to reimagine the doughnut enterprise altogether, something is sure — the doughnut youngsters are all proper.

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