About Us
The very first word is "How do you do?"...
How do you do? Welcome to the home of hot, fresh, funky mini donuts!
In case you missed it, the line above comes from a Grateful Dead song called, "Cosmic Charlie." And, Cosmic Charlic is kinda where Wake the Dead Donuts all started...
You see, Tim + Steve love donuts. Wherever they went (and they went alot of places following groups like Phil Lesh & Friends + Phish around the country), they always sought out the best local donuts + donut shops. Then, somewhere along the line, a dream was hatched...
Fast forward a bit + these two, long-time friends had both become restaurant / food truck industry veterans, still seeking the best donuts wherever we set up, slowly making their way until...
A global pandemic happened. Food trucks + live music first shut down, then reopened into a completely different environment/situation. Tim masked up + continued to work on cramped food trucks. Steve lost his job of over 5 years, then bounced around helping restaurants + restaurant tech companies with their marketing. Neither were particularly happy. Both were ready for a change. They decided: it was time to dust off the rusty strings of that dream + Wake the Dead!
Enter Cosmic Charlie + his donut factory.
After weeks of searching unsuccessfully for a used donut robot, we stumbled across Charlie online. Charlie is a genuine Tennessee talker, telling us all about his decades working the the fair/festival circuit slinging lemonade, cotton candy, and mini donuts. Thrown for a loop by the pandemic + getting on in years, Charlie decided to downsize the donut business + sell his 2x Lil' Orbits 1200 donut robots to us.
Several months of tinkering with the donut robots, experimenting with recipes, and getting our frying technique down, Wake the Dead Donuts opened on April 20th, 2022, giving away our hot, fresh, and funky mini-donuts to a hungry public completely free of charge.
The rest was donut history...
Find us popping up around Western MA or
Book us for your own private event
Steve
Steve's bounced around the country doing everything from teaching history in California, bartending in Oregon, working nonprofits in Utah, + washing dishes / running the marketing for a food truck in Boston.
Tim*
* (does not appear as pictured in real life)
Though a bit camera shy, Tim has never been shied away from his passion for food, specifically, his love of baked goods + donuts. Over the years, he's managed a half dozen different food trucks ranging from The Chicken & Rice Guys to Holyoke Hummus to the Quebrada Bakery Truck.
