A Kelowna couple is sinking their teeth into the vegan, gluten-free market with their delicious donuts.
Joel Murga and Jaide Hatfield, owners of Jaide & Joel’s Bakery, have been creating donuts for businesses around the Okanagan Valley for the past year.
Starting their days at 4 a.m., the dynamic duo rents a commercial kitchen in Kelowna to bake roughly 300 donuts a day before delivering them to Nature’s Fare stores in Vernon and Kelowna on Tuesdays and Fridays, and on Mondays and Thursdays in Penticton in West Kelowna.
Hatfield also has another part-time job and Murga is taking science classes at UBCO, which he said comes in handy with the donut creations.
“My sister, she owned her own bakery for about five years, and she ended up wanting to take a break from it for a while, so I decided I wanted to take part and do a different version of it,” Murga said.
With celiac disease and allergies to a number of ingredients, Murga wanted to do vegan and gluten-free baking with Hatfield, who is also a vegan.
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The couple started selling donuts at farmer’s markets, and business took off from there.
“Our main goal right now is to open up our very first cafe,” Murga said, with the aim to expand to into bread making, cinnamon buns and other vegan treats.
“There’s such a big vegan community, and they’ve been so supportive, it’s awesome,” he said.
Murga said as more people have become knowledgeable about how food is made and where it comes from, there’s been an uptick in the vegan trend.
“I think what’s sets us apart from the competition is also that we do all gluten-free baking. I believe our baking’s really good,” he chuckled. “I would say our niche is the donut making.”
Ingredients are made fresh and organic.
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“When we first start making everything, we even … mix our own flours because it makes our donut fluffier and lighter,” he said.
For first-timers, he recommends the vanilla Funfetti donut, “which is the best introduction to all of our donut making because most of the recipes are based off that donut.”
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