In the groove: Donut bus gets storefront home
Published 8:00 am Wednesday, April 19, 2023
- Steve and Cindi Garden (center, holding scissors) celebrate on Monday with Bowling Green Area Chamber of Commerce members and other well-wishers at the ribbon cutting for the Groovy Gus Mini Donuts business that grew out of a food truck.
The donuts are miniature. The growth is massive.
Bowling Green’s Groovy Gus Donut Bus, a food truck started in 2019 as a way to “spread joy and make a little money,” according to its founders, has met that goal and more.
On Monday, the enterprise that started in a van decorated in psychedelic colors and with a sunglass-wearing white squirrel as its mascot took another step in its growth with the official ribbon-cutting for a storefront location called Groovy Gus Mini Donuts in the Ford Centre at 1713 Scottsville Road.
“We didn’t know it would grow this fast,” said Steve Garden, co-founder of the business along with wife, Cindi (Roehm) Garden. “People connected with us more than we anticipated.”
That connection to a mobile business that offered multiple flavors of the bite-sized donuts was aided by the COVID-19 pandemic, Cindi Garden explained.
“COVID hit, and we could still be in business,” she said. “We’ve had great support from people in the Bowling Green area.”
So much support that, according to Steve Garden, the business is now approaching 1.5 million donuts sold.
That number is sure to grow now that Groovy Gus can abandon its peripatetic ways and set up shop in the storefront that opened a couple of months ago.
“This puts us into a whole other market,” said Steve Garden, who gave up his job in hotel sales to help get the donut business rolling. “We’ll now be able to do catering and offer more toppings. We had so many ideas (with the food truck), but we didn’t have the space we needed.”
Cindi Garden said that space will be utilized to expand Groovy Gus’s offerings to include coffee, slushies and gluten-free donuts at the storefront location that’s decorated with a vintage television console and various toys that tie in with the hippie-era theme.
The store’s menu now includes 18 different toppings instead of the half-dozen or so that were offered on the food truck, and Cindi Garden said the added kitchen space allows the business to cater for groups numbering in the hundreds.
Groovy Gus will continue with the food truck, with possible excursions possibly back on the road nearly full-time in the near future.
