The man behind Tuga Pastries shares the story of its success

DIOGO FERREIRA of TUGA PASTRIES

Diogo Ferreira started up Tuga Pastries in 2017 as a hole in the wall bakery, selling pastéis de nata (Portuguese egg tarts) based on his late father’s family recipe. From there the business has grown to encompass three (soon to be four) sites and a thriving wholesaling business, with Tuga’s range of pastries, cakes and breads sold to cafes across Sydney and as far afield as Newcastle and Wollongong. Foodservice Rep caught up with Diogo to find out about the origins of the business and the story behind its success.

“My father was a pastry chef – he and my mother had emigrated here from Portugal in 1985 and started up their first bakery in Bondi in 1994, so I had grown up around pastries and cakes my whole life,” Diogo recalls. “But Dad never trained me on how to make them – he never wanted me in the kitchen. When I opened my first café, Village on Cloey in Clovelly, I was adamant about bringing his recipes back to life and I had to spend a couple of years experimenting, because what he’d written down didn’t cover every detail – there was a lot left to taste and eye. I knew the taste and the look but I didn’t know how to achieve it, so there was plenty of trial and error – more error than trial! – and selling small quantities of stuff.”

A few years later, a relative who owned the catering business a few doors down retired and insisted Diogo take over her shop. He named it Tuga Pastries, intending to focus on pastries and so keep his father’s recipes alive. “The original concept was to have just me and a couple of other pastry chefs working there, so when I needed a break I could lock the door and go.” Then Covid came and threw a spanner in the works. “It was really scary so I decided to throw everything at it and sink or swim – first we plummeted, then we bounced back dramatically. We did whatever we could to keep trading – we started wholesaling our pastries to other cafes and making little desserts and tarts, and people started queuing up every day because they wanted something sweet and tasty. We also stocked the stuff that was running low at supermarkets, everything from flour to pasta to sugar to bread, whatever we could get.”

tuga pastries is famed for its portuguese egg tarts

Hard work pays off

Prior to Covid hitting, Diogo had been looking at taking on another site in Alexandria, and once the Clovelly business picked up he realised he needed it because the wholesale side of the business was taking off, requiring dedicated production space. “At the time the new M8 tunnel opening had been delayed and there were huge fences blocking the building – customers couldn’t even see us so I thought we’d do our wholesale production there for the next six months and just sell out of Clovelly. But a year later the fences were still there and I needed to open a shopfront, so I made a massive banner and covered the fences with signage and it worked – people just walked around and found the entrance. Then the fences came down but we had another lockdown and I was like, come on man, stop kicking me, I’m trying here! We couldn’t get staff and I was doing everything I could to get media exposure, getting magazines to come out and interview me – and soon after we had 100 metre long queues every weekend, which was great.”

Looking back at that time, Diogo acknowledges it was hard work – “we didn’t know which direction things would go, we just came in with a brave face and hoped for the best every day. After Covid finished, things changed again and we adapted and kept punching along.” This included Diogo buying out his business partner in Village on Cloey, renovating it and renaming it Tuga x Village – bringing the total number of Tuga outlets to three, each of which has a different menu and setup. 

staff at tuga x village - the former village on cloey

“Tuga x Village is more dine-in, it’s about a 40 seater, whereas Tuga Pastries in Clovelly is a takeaway bakery. Alexandria is a takeaway concept bakery with some outdoor seating but you order at the counter.”

The product range is heavily influenced by Portuguese pastry, harking back to Diogo’s parents’ pastry business. “My Dad’s signature was pastel de nata, otherwise known as a Portuguese egg tart – he had his own special recipe and he was basically the person who put that on the map in Sydney. He and my mother started their business at a small corner shop back when there was no social media or influencers. Somehow word of their products got to Bert Newton and he profiled them on his TV show, and from that day their business started to take off and they eventually went into wholesaling, producing 3000 pastéis de nata by hand per day at their factory in Marrickville.

“To this day I have an obsession with Portugal, and in fact the name Tuga is a slang word for a Portuguese person, just like Aussie is slang for Australian. Portuguese food is very broad, because they were great colonisers who went all over the globe and brought back different ingredients and cuisine styles from the nations they encountered. When it comes to their pastries and desserts, there’s a great deal of egg yolk, and the historical reason for that is they would use egg whites to starch the soldiers’ uniforms and they had all these yolks left over, and not being wasteful people, they needed to find a use for them. The pastry itself is multi-layered with – similar to how the French make croissants, but the technique is different. Our pastry is a lot more buttery - It goes into a scorching hot oven and cooks really quickly, so you need plenty of butter to achieve a nice crispness.”

Breads added to the range

abacate torricado

In addition to the sweet pastries, the Tuga range includes torricados – Portuguese style sourdough chargrilled with garlic and olive oil. “It’s a traditional sourdough which was used to test the first press of the olive oil, but we’ve adapted it with modern finishes,” Diogo says. “I think during Covid people started experimenting with making bread at home, and that brought a demand for bread back into foodservice, which was fantastic, so we decided to work on that because no one else in the local area was selling it. We’ve also started doing bolo do caco, which is similar to an English muffin but made with sweet potato – it’s crunchy with a soft interior and it’s bloody delicious, so we serve that in the café and also sell it to our wholesale customers.”

bolo de caco

Diogo plans to add more breads to the range later in the year to coincide with the opening of Tuga’s next site which will be on the street level of a Sydney CBD tower. “It’s a mixed space and we will really stand out – there is a bakery attached and that’s where I intend to push the new bread, once we open in November.”

Taking every day as it comes

In the meantime, the wholesale side of the business has continued to flourish. “We’ve made it a priority to get our products to the cafes who want to stock out – as we grew in Alexandria we took on more space and so two years ago we moved our production kitchen to Marrickville. We have a great distribution network and everyone seems to enjoy what we’re doing – the biggest problem is people always want what they can’t have! We want to make everyone happy but it’s not always possible to supply the same pastries we’re selling in our shops because they don’t necessarily travel well, besides which we’re using quite expensive ingredients. When you’re selling direct to the public you can mark it up, but you can’t do that when you’re wholesaling, so it can be a challenge. We’re now working on a premium wholesale range but everything’s tight right now with costs, so it’s another element we’ve got to work on.”

Diogo says he stays grounded by taking every day as it comes – “if we need to adjust or pivot, we’ll do so. We’ve done that so many times now it’s almost an expectation – we need to stay on our toes for when the next wave appears.” And while the business is growing, he worries that if he stops innovating it will go backwards. “I don’t want to say no to our wholesale partners or our retail customers. I was happy with just the small shop in Clovelly, but circumstances change and I’ve had to adapt. I still say yes to everything, which gets me into trouble, but I love that every day is a challenge because it gives you motivation to get up – there’s always a fresh spark there.”