Hidden Gems: Meet Jennifer Levi of Beloved Bakery LLC

Today we’d like to introduce you to Jennifer Levi.

Hi Jennifer, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
Beloved Bakery didn’t begin with a business plan. It began in a kitchen.

Some of my earliest memories are sitting up with my grandmother, Adell, while she baked. During the holidays—and honestly, whenever she simply felt like baking—I was right there beside her, basically serving as her little sous chef. I watched her make sweet potato pies, cakes, and the desserts people in our family still remember. People would practically beg her to bake for them, and she would tell them no without a second thought. My grandmother baked when she wanted to bake. Period.

But by sitting beside her, I learned early what things were supposed to look like, smell like, taste like, and feel like. She taught me that it doesn’t take a lot to make something taste good. She gave me the foundation.

My mother gave me something just as important: adaptability.

She taught me that cooking isn’t always about having every ingredient or following a recipe word for word. Sometimes you look at what you have and figure it out. If you’re missing something, you learn what can replace it. You adjust. You pivot. You make it work.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but those two lessons—knowing the foundation and knowing how to adapt—would eventually become a huge part of how I approach both food and entrepreneurship.

Then I became a mother of three.

We did not have “let’s take everybody out to a restaurant whenever we feel like it” money. Feeding three children and a husband could feel like feeding a small football team, so I learned how to make real food at home. Good food!

But I didn’t want my children to feel like they were missing something because we weren’t constantly eating out. I wanted them to have the restaurant experience at home. So I cooked. I experimented. I made different dishes, desserts, special meals, and things that made an ordinary night feel like something. And just like my grandmother had done with me, I brought my children into the kitchen.

Today, all three of them have their own relationship with food and cooking, and I think that comes from growing up understanding that the kitchen wasn’t just the place where dinner came from. It was where we gathered. It was where we talked. It was where you showed somebody you loved them.

Eventually, all that food started escaping my house.

Friends would come over and eat. I would take food and desserts to work. Somebody would taste something and tell somebody else. My sweet potato pound cake became one of those desserts people would ask about before I even walked into the room, and my sweet potato pie developed a reputation of its own. In 2023, my pie was even recognized as the “Best Sweet Potato Pie.”

Little by little, I started realizing something: what felt ordinary to me because I had grown up around it was actually very special to other people.

That realization became Beloved Bakery LLC.

But I knew I didn’t want Beloved to feel like every other bakery. I wanted to preserve the old-school desserts and traditions I grew up with while presenting them in a way that felt current, fun, soulful, and completely like me. That’s where our tagline, “Old-School Desserts. New-School Soul.” comes from.

Another important part of Beloved’s story is my circle. Three of my closest friends—Petina, Janella, and Teesha—have pushed me, encouraged me, challenged me, and sometimes believed in Beloved before I was completely ready to believe in how big it could become myself.

Together, we’re four Black entrepreneurial women, all mothers, all women who have been married, and all figuring out what it means to build something of our own while still handling real life. Somewhere along the way, we jokingly started calling ourselves the “First Ex-Wives Club.”

The name is funny, but the support is very real.

Entrepreneurship can get lonely, and these women understand the ideas, the pivots, the doubts, the excitement, and the occasional “Girl, what are you doing?” conversation. They don’t just cheer me on—they hold me accountable. Sometimes they have more confidence in my next move than I do, and they are absolutely not above getting on my nerves until I make it.

That kind of friendship has helped me stop looking at Beloved as something I simply enjoy doing and start seeing it for what it can actually become.

The biggest evolution came when I started experimenting with beignets.

Instead of simply putting another dessert in a box, I started thinking about how people experience food. I developed what I now call the Beloved Beignet Experience—fresh beignets fried on-site and served hot with sauces inspired by classic and Southern flavors, including strawberry, peach cobbler, caramel, chocolate, and even my grandmother’s sweet potato pie filling.

That changed everything.

At one community event, we served hundreds of people, and I kept hearing, “These are better than New Orleans.” Now, whether I’m willing to start an international incident over that statement is another story, but I definitely accepted the compliment.

More importantly, I watched people gather around the table. They watched the beignets fry, picked their sauces, talked to us, brought their friends back, and stayed for the experience.

That was the moment I understood that Beloved could be bigger than cakes, pies, or even beignets. It could be about creating the same feeling I grew up with and tried to create for my own children: good food, people gathered together, and a little bit of love coming out of the kitchen.

Today, I’m building Beloved while still working full-time at the Evanston Police Department, which means late nights, recipe testing, pop-ups, packaging experiments, grant applications, spreadsheets, and the occasional conversation with myself about why I thought entrepreneurship was a good idea.

But I know exactly why I’m doing it.

Beloved lets me take what my grandmother taught me, what my mother taught me, what I learned feeding my own family, and the encouragement of women who continue to push me forward, and turn all of it into something that can reach people who may never have sat at our kitchen table.

I didn’t necessarily set out to become an entrepreneur.

I just finally realized that what the women in my family had been doing beautifully for generations deserved a bigger table.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Smooth? Not even close.

One of my biggest challenges has been learning that being good at baking and running a bakery are two completely different skill sets.

I already understood food. I knew how something should taste, how to adjust a recipe, how to feed a crowd, and how to make people happy at the table. What I had to learn was everything that comes after somebody says, “You should sell this.”

Pricing. Packaging. Licensing. Insurance. Commercial kitchens. Equipment. Branding. Marketing. Food costs. Portion sizes. Production schedules. Social media. Websites. Grant applications. And spreadsheets—so many spreadsheets.

There are days when I think, “I just wanted to make somebody a pound cake. How did we get here?”

Another challenge has been building Beloved while still working full-time at the Evanston Police Department. Most of the business gets built after work, at night, on weekends, and in whatever pieces of time I can find. That means sometimes I’m testing recipes when I should probably be sleeping, answering business emails during lunch, or researching equipment at an hour when reasonable people are in bed.

Money has also required me to be very intentional. I am not building Beloved with an unlimited budget or a huge investor behind me. Every purchase has to make sense. I’ve had to learn when to spend, when to wait, when to improvise, and when the cheaper option will actually cost me more in the long run. Ironically, that takes me right back to what my mother taught me in the kitchen: look at what you have, adjust, and figure it out.

Scaling has presented another challenge. It is one thing to make an amazing dessert for your family. It is another thing to make that dessert consistently for paying customers, produce larger quantities, transport everything safely, set up an event, fry beignets live, keep quality high, and still make the experience look effortless to the customer.

And then there has been the challenge I probably underestimated the most: myself.

I can overthink. I can want everything to be perfect before I let anybody see it. Sometimes I have had to be pushed to stop researching, stop tweaking, stop saying, “I’m still working on it,” and actually put Beloved in front of people.

That is where my First Ex-Wives Club has been invaluable. Petina, Janella, and Teesha are not the kind of friends who are going to let me hide behind perfectionism. They will encourage me, but they will also ask, “Okay, so when are you actually doing it?” Every entrepreneur needs at least one person like that. I somehow ended up with three.

What I’m learning is that the obstacles are not separate from building the business. They are the business.

Every event teaches me something. Every recipe test teaches me something. Every purchase I regret teaches me something. Every time something works better than I expected, that teaches me something too.

Beloved is still growing, and I am still learning. The road has definitely not been smooth, but I don’t think I would want it to be completely smooth. The bumps have forced me to become more resourceful, more confident, and much more willing to trust what I already know.

My grandmother taught me the foundation. My mother taught me how to pivot.

Entrepreneurship has taught me when to do both.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
Beloved Bakery LLC is an Evanston-based dessert brand rooted in old-school recipes, family tradition, and the idea that dessert should feel just as good as it tastes.

Our tagline is “Old-School Desserts. New-School Soul.” That really sums up what Beloved is. I make the kinds of desserts people grew up with—sweet potato pie, pound cakes, cookies, and other nostalgic favorites—but I like giving them personality and presenting them in ways that feel fresh, fun, and memorable.

One of the things Beloved is becoming especially known for is the Beloved Beignet Experience. Fresh beignets are fried on-site and served hot with sauces and fillings like strawberry, caramel, chocolate, peach cobbler, and my grandmother Adell’s sweet potato pie filling.

That experience is important to me because I don’t just want to hand someone a dessert in a box. I want people to smell the beignets frying, watch them being made, choose their sauces, share with each other, and have a little fun with it.

At the same time, the traditional desserts are still very much the heart of Beloved. My sweet potato pound cake has become one of the items people most associate with the business, and my sweet potato pie has built a reputation of its own.

I also love creating new products. Most recently, I developed an oversized brown-butter dark chocolate pecan cookie called Dat Good Good, because apparently I am incapable of simply making a chocolate chip cookie and leaving it alone.

What sets Beloved apart is the balance between tradition and personality. I respect the recipes and flavors I grew up with, but I am not afraid to play with them, reimagine them, or give them a little attitude.

What I am most proud of is that Beloved is beginning to have a recognizable identity. It is colorful, soulful, nostalgic, playful, and rooted in family and community.

At the end of the day, I want people to know that Beloved is about good food made with intention. Whether it is a pound cake, a sweet potato pie, a cookie, or a hot beignet covered in somebody’s favorite sauce, I want it to taste like somebody cared enough to make it right.

Where do you see things going in the next 5-10 years?
I think the food and dessert industry is moving toward something that really excites me: people don’t just want food anymore. They want an experience, a story, and a reason to remember where they got it.

Over the next five to ten years, I think we’re going to see even more interest in nostalgia, but not necessarily nostalgia exactly the way our grandparents served it. People want familiar flavors that remind them of home, childhood, holidays, family, and culture—but they also want to experience those flavors in new ways.

That is one of the reasons I believe so strongly in what we are building with Beloved.

“Old-School Desserts. New-School Soul.” isn’t just a catchy tagline for me. It is where I think the industry is going. You can respect a sweet potato pie that has been made the same way for generations and still ask, “What happens if I put that filling on a hot beignet?” Both things can exist.

I also believe the experience surrounding food is going to become increasingly important. There will always be a place for walking into a bakery and buying something from a case, but I think the businesses that stand out will give customers another reason to engage with them.

People want to see things being made. They want to customize. They want to participate. They want something they can talk about afterward. And, yes, we live in a social-media world, so sometimes they want something worth pulling their phone out for, too.

That is why I see the Beloved Beignet Experience eventually becoming much more than a pop-up station. I see opportunities for private events, festivals, collaborations, interactive dessert classes, adult experiences, youth workshops, and other ways to bring people into the process rather than simply handing them a finished product.

At the same time, I think value is going to matter more than ever.

Food costs are rising, operating a business is expensive, and customers are becoming more intentional about where they spend their money. I don’t necessarily think that means everyone will always choose the cheapest option. I think it means businesses are going to have to give people a reason to say, “That was worth it.”

For Beloved, that means the food has to be good. Period. The branding can be beautiful, the setup can be fun, and the experience can be memorable, but none of that matters if the beignet is not good.

Technology will also continue changing the industry. Online ordering, delivery, automation, data, and social media will make it easier for small businesses to reach customers and operate more efficiently. I plan to use those tools, but I never want technology to remove the human part of Beloved. Food is personal. Especially the kind of food I make.

Long-term, I would love for Beloved to have a permanent home in the Chicagoland area—a place where the bakery, the beignet experience, classes, community, and the stories behind our food can all live together.

I don’t know exactly what the dessert industry will look like ten years from now, but I believe people will still want the same things they have always wanted: good food, connection, comfort, and something that feels special.

The presentation may change. The technology may change. The way we reach the customer will definitely change.

But people are still going to gather around good food.

I’m betting Beloved on that.

Pricing:

• Signature Pound Cakes — $40 Full-size old-school pound cakes, including Jen Jen’s Sweet Potato Pound Cake.
• Big Mama — $25 Full-size pie made from our family-inspired recipe.
• Lil Big Mama — $5 each Individual-sized version of our signature sweet potato pie.
• Dat Good Good — $5 each Oversized brown-butter dark chocolate pecan cookies.
• Beloved Beignet Experience — Custom Pricing Live, on-site beignet experiences for private events, community events, and special occasions; pricing varies based on guest count and event needs.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://belovedevanston.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/belovedevanston/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BelovedEvanston/
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@belovedevanston

Image Credits
Jennifer Hayes Levi Beloved