After 12 years building St.Gerry’s around one of Greece’s most recognisable sweets, founder Dean Giannakis is taking the Melbourne-born business into a much broader corner of the dessert market, developing his own range of spreads, frozen loukoumades and traditional Greek sour cherries for wholesale, distribution and, increasingly, international customers.
It is a significant shift for a brand that began with Giannakis selling hot loukoumades at events and festivals. The product is still at the centre of St.Gerry’s, but the business model is changing. Rather than only making desserts for customers, Giannakis now wants St.Gerry’s products sitting behind the counters and inside the kitchens of other dessert businesses.
For anyone familiar with the St.Gerry’s story, there is a certain logic to the move.
Giannakis first conceived the business after visiting Kefalonia, the Greek island from which his family originates, and seeing crowds gather for loukoumades during celebrations for Saint Gerasimos. Back in Melbourne, he worked with his father to develop his own recipe. The name St.Gerry’s itself is a tribute to the patron saint of Kefalonia.
By November 2014, St.Gerry’s was up and running, reportedly just 11 weeks after Giannakis returned from Greece. What began as a side business alongside his corporate career quickly gathered momentum. By 2016, SBS was profiling Giannakis and St.Gerry’s as part of its Small Business Secrets coverage, documenting the transition from corporate finance to a full-time food business.
Twelve years on, Giannakis sees the equity built in that name as the foundation for the next stage.
“It was time to leverage from my 12-year-old brand and use its following to create products for sale,” he says.
The distinction is important. St.Gerry’s has operated wholesale and catering arms before, but the new range pushes the brand further into the supply side of the dessert industry, with products designed not simply for its own loukoumades but for doughnut shops, creperies, gelato businesses, frozen yoghurt bars, açaí stores, bakeries, cafés and other dessert operators.
At the centre of the expansion is a range of 5kg praline spreads developed with a business in Greece.
There are eight flavours: pistachio, hazelnut chocolate, white chocolate vanilla, strawberry, Bueno, cappuccino, crunchy speculoos and mastiha kataifi.
Giannakis says the higher dairy component gives the spreads a creamier consistency, while the breadth of flavours gives businesses room to use the same range across very different menus. Cappuccino and mastiha kataifi are among the more unusual additions, with Giannakis identifying both as points of difference in a category already crowded with chocolate, hazelnut and pistachio products.
The spreads are deliberately versatile. They can be piped into doughnuts, cannoli, cookies and crepes; spooned over açaí, frozen yoghurt or ice cream; folded through gelato; or used in cheesecakes, brownies, loaded cookies, tsoureki, tiramisu and layered cakes.
That versatility is central to the commercial proposition. A single product needs to work hard in a hospitality kitchen, particularly when operators are dealing with labour costs, preparation time and menus that increasingly cross the lines between bakery, café, gelateria and dessert bar.
There is already evidence of the range entering conventional distribution. Victorian wholesaler Camati Food & Beverage currently lists a number of St.Gerry’s 5kg spreads, including pistachio, cappuccino, hazelnut, strawberry, speculoos and white chocolate vanilla.
Alongside the spreads, Giannakis has introduced St.Gerry’s own sour cherries, or glyka tou koutaliou. Spoon sweets have a long place in Greek food culture, traditionally made by preserving fruit in syrup and served alone or with yoghurt and other desserts.
St.Gerry’s version is designed to retain the richness of the fruit while leaving some texture and bite. In a commercial kitchen, Giannakis sees the cherries moving well beyond their traditional presentation, used over cheesecake, brownies, slices, ice cream and frozen yoghurt.
Then there are the loukoumades themselves.
For years, much of St.Gerry’s identity was tied to the process of making them fresh. Giannakis’s new frozen version turns that experience into a product another business can reproduce without making and proofing dough from scratch.
The loukoumades are supplied frozen in boxes of 300 and are ready to cook in a fryer or air fryer. They have been developed to produce a consistent size, colour and finish while removing much of the preparation traditionally associated with the dessert.
For a café, restaurant or dessert shop, that means loukoumades can potentially be added to a menu without a dedicated dough-making process or specialised doughnut machinery.
It may be a less romantic proposition than standing over a bowl of dough, but commercially it makes sense. Consistency, preparation time and ease of service become particularly important once a product moves from an owner-operated store into businesses where different staff may be cooking it from one shift to the next.
The frozen product also gives St.Gerry’s a way to sell the thing on which its reputation was built without having to operate the venue in which it is served.
That is perhaps the most interesting part of Giannakis’s latest move. He is no longer expanding only by putting another St.Gerry’s counter in front of more customers. He is putting St.Gerry’s behind other businesses.
According to Giannakis, the products are now supplying hundreds of dessert businesses, independent supermarkets, distributors, larger dessert brands and individual customers. St.Gerry’s is supplying across Australia and has begun supplying customers in the Netherlands and the Philippines, with discussions also taking place with businesses in the United States, Canada and Pakistan. New Zealand is among the markets being considered next.
It is an ambitious step from the Melbourne food scene where the business first made its name, although St.Gerry’s has spent much of its history testing how far a traditional Greek dessert can travel.
When SBS spoke with Giannakis in 2016, loukoumades were still unfamiliar enough to many Australian customers that he found himself describing them simply as “Greek donuts”. The business built its following by taking the traditional honey, cinnamon and walnut version and placing it alongside an increasingly inventive menu of contemporary flavours.
The new product range applies much the same thinking on a larger scale: Greek influence where it makes sense, contemporary dessert flavours where there is demand, and products designed to be used well beyond a Greek kitchen.
Retail is the next part of the equation. Smaller jars of selected spreads are planned for home pantries, moving a range initially created around 5kg hospitality formats into a consumer product. St.Gerry’s website currently lists its online shop as “coming soon” and is directing spread orders through the business in the interim.
A banana spread is also in development, with Giannakis indicating that further products are being kept under wraps for now.
For the moment, customers and businesses can order through St.Gerry’s by email, through its website or via Instagram, alongside its distributor network.
Learn more:
Website: stgerrys.com.au
Instagram: @st_gerrys
Wholesale enquiries: [email protected]
Read also Dean Giannakis: The Greek Donut Master
