A sweet sensation: Teen food truck owner brings mini donuts to People’s Choice Festival
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Hungry in Happy Valley: Food trucks
This summer we’re highlighting food trucks across Centre County. Which one should we try next? Email jmichael@centredaily.com to give suggestions.
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The People’s Choice Festival features more than 40 food vendors, including a Pine Glen resident who’s making his festival debut and a “sweet” case for why people should stop at his food truck.
Gavin Guenot, a 19-year-old Mountaintop resident who graduated from Bald Eagle Area School District in 2025, has his Snowcap Sweets: By Mountaintop Concessions food truck set up directly inside the festival’s main entrance. That means that almost everyone who enters the event can smell his freshly-made confections upon arrival.
The young entrepreneur’s food truck offers 20-plus flavors of mini doughnuts, both sweet and savory (and no larger than a golf ball), along with an assortment of sourdough and Liège-style waffles with various toppings.
“As far as I’m concerned, everybody has a soft spot for doughnuts,” Guenot said. “Once I found out that there was a way that we can make them fresh, right here on the spot, it made for a really awesome little business idea — and I mean there’s not many other mini doughnut trucks around here, or at least not that I’ve seen.”
Guenot purchased his truck in December from a Harrisburg food truck owner, who built it specifically with the goal of serving mini doughnuts — although the truck was put on the market soon after it was built. The Harrisburg area is rife with mini doughnut trucks, Guenot said, and he wanted to take the idea and apply it to the Happy Valley area, and beyond.
After doing some quick touch-ups to the truck, like wrapping it with a custom, Snowcap-themed decal, he opened for business in late February. Since then, he’s been taking it to fairs, festivals and events all across Centre, Clearfield and Huntingdon counties.
Despite his young age, Guenot’s mini doughnut truck isn’t his first time in the food vendor industry. He started his own produce stand shortly after his high school graduation, and ran it for about a year.
“I sold fruits and vegetables here and there, so I guess that kind of got my feet wet in terms of selling fresh food to people,” Guenot said. “I guess selling produce isn’t really the same thing as running a food truck, but it’s got some of the same concepts, and honestly, I just want to be busy — and with this food truck, we’re definitely being kept busy.”
The Centre Daily Times caught up with Guenot at the People’s Choice Festival’s opening day Thursday, where he shared the secrets to how he makes his doughnuts so quickly, what kind of doughnuts are the most popular and what being in the food truck industry at such a young age has been like.
The doughnut-making process
On a busy shift, Guenot may end up cranking out several hundred doughnuts to loads of customers. The secret to making them quickly and keeping them all fresh is in a process he’s worked hard to perfect.
First, the dough must be mixed in an industrial mixer and rested for a few moments.
After that, Guenot fires up his doughnut-making machine and puts globs of dough into the machine’s hopper, which dispenses tiny, mini doughnut-shaped rings into a fryer. The rings are dispensed in an alternating pattern so that they don’t stick together during the frying process.
Once they’re dispensed, a conveyor belt hidden below the hot oil pulls the doughnuts to a part of the machine that automatically flips them over so that their opposite side can be fried, saving Guenot time — and likely a lot of grease burns — if he tried to flip them himself.
From there, the doughnuts continue down the conveyor belt until both sides are evenly cooked, and they’re then dispensed down a small ramp into paper french fry boat, where they will be topped and served to a hungry customer.
“It’s like a little mini doughnut robot that does a lot of the work for me — it’s pretty wicked, and pretty convenient,” Guenot said. “I wish I had an idea for exactly how many doughnuts we serve in a day, but our machine doesn’t have a counter on it, unlike others. They can only sit here for five minutes or so before they cool too, so we try not to make a lot in advance. We want everyone to have their doughnuts made fresh.”
Of his many flavors, Guenot said that some of his most popular include cin-bun, which sees the doughnuts iced with a milky-white, almost translucent glaze and topped with cinnamon sugar, and Fruity Pebbles, which sees the doughnuts hit with the same glaze, and topped with — you guessed it — a hearty portion of colorful Fruity Pebbles, that give the doughnuts a unique crunch.
Other popular flavors include maple bacon, Oreo and Nutella, although the young owner says that there’s not a single bad flavor on the menu.
“We try to provide flavor options for everyone’s taste, and I think we do that pretty well,” Guenot said. “There are maybe four or five base icings we use, and then we build all of our flavors around those. It’s whatever we think sounds like a good flavor combination really — and my girlfriend, she’s really smart about it, definitely the brains behind creating new flavors.”
Being a young food truck owner
In a business dominated by seasoned cooking veterans, being a young food truck owner can come with its challenges — just ask Alexa Cowher, the 16-year-old Penns Valley resident who opened up her own food truck earlier this year, and is working her way through the ins and outs of mobile food service.
Guenot has been presented with his own challenges, like finding an established base of customers. But he said a number of other food truck owners who have been in the game for longer have been willing helpers.
“All the older owners that have been here and done it, they’ve helped me a lot with almost every question I’ve had, and that’s been a great thing to rely on,” Guenot said. “Any advice I need, someone’s been willing to help, and just it’s been great.”
Moving forward, Guenot is looking forward to expanding his food truck’s range, and would like to break into more festivals and events in Centre County and the surrounding area.
For now though, visitors can find Guenot stationed just inside the main entrance of the People’s Choice Festival, which runs from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Saturday, and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Sunday. Parking for the event typically costs $10, but during dinner hours (from 5-7 p.m.) parking is free.
Visiting Snowcap Sweets
Cuisine: Mini donuts and sourdough/Liège-style waffles
Where to find them: People’s Choice Festival and other events around Centre, Clearfield and Huntingdon counties
How to track them: Facebook primarily, Instagram, www.snowcapsweets.com
