HOW KRISPY KREME MADE ITS D
Its first Irish store caused chaos this week but the global doughnut chain started as a simple family business that cut a hole in the wall to sell its tasty wares – and you won’t believe what the ‘secret’ ingredient is...
IT WAS the hot sweet smell that drew them in. From the moment the doughnuts began baking at midnight, right through until 4am, passers-by would stop at the small factory, begging to be allowed to buy some of the freshly made sticky treats. At that time, residents in Winston-Salem were more accustomed to the odour of tobacco wafting through the streets of their North Carolina city, thanks to the presence of the RJ Reynolds Company, whose brands included Camel, Newport and Pall Mall cigarettes. Little wonder the sugary aromas from the newly established Krispy Kreme doughnut company began attracting locals from all over the city to the building where they were being made each night to supply nearby grocery stores.
The 22-year-old owner, Vernon Rudolph, was not one to pass up a chance to sell his wares. Rather ingeniously he decided to simply cut a hole in a wall from where he could sell directly to delighted customers, who were willing to queue for as long as it took to get their hands on the original glazed doughnut.
And so in the summer of 1937 began the legend of Krispy Kreme — one of America’s most iconic food brands.
A product that last week arrived in Ireland to a rather extraordinary reception. On its opening day, more than 300 people queued from 4am at the doors of the new store in Blanchardstown, Dublin.
Days later the shop was forced to announce it was closing its 24-hour drive-thru between the hours of 11.30pm and 6am after complaints from local residents about excessive traffic and cars beeping their horns throughout the night.
The frenzy for Krispy Kreme showed no signs of abating this week, with reports of traffic chaos during the day in the already busy suburb as people waited up to an hour to get their hands on a box of 12 doughnuts selling for €16.95.
So where exactly did it all begin? And why are so many people in thrall to this particular version of fried dough?
It helps, of course, that the marketing department decided to make a big deal out of the recipe for their doughnuts being kept ‘top secret’, apparently held in a vault in the Krispy Kreme headquarters, which are still located in Winston-Salem.
Although a simple online search reveals how the original recipe is believed to have been made from fluffed egg whites, sugar, shortening (a kind of solid fat similar to margarine), skimmed milk, flour and the ‘secret’ ingredient that possibly makes them so irresistible to Irish people: mashed potatoes.
When it comes to where it began, like most histories of anything, there are inconsistencies and blanks. What is definitely known is that Vernon Rudolph was born and raised in Marshall County, Kentucky, the eldest of four children. When he was 18 he moved to Paducah, a small city in the same state, where he worked in his uncle’s general grocery store.
According to the Krispy Kreme website, Vernon’s uncle brought a doughnut shop from a French chef named Joe LeBeau, who passed on his secret recipe for light and fluffy doughnuts. But in an interview 15 years ago with Vernon’s son, Carver Rudolph, he revealed how in the 1980s the Krispy Kreme company sent one of its in-house lawyers to Paducah to find out more about this French chef and his secret recipe. They could find no trace of LeBeau.
In the late 1990s, Carver was contacted by a historian who also wanted to know about the origins of the doughnut and so, curious himself about the empire his father had founded, he travelled to Paducah to meet with him and conduct some of their own research.
‘There was no doughnut shop in 1933,’ Carver explained in the interview. ‘There was no Joe LeBeau.’
However they did find a Joseph G LeBoeuf who they traced to Louisville in Kentucky. This man worked as a cook on a barge on the Ohio river and was famous for three things — flapjacks, coconut cakes and light, fluffy doughnuts.
Carver believes this is the man who passed on his recipe to his father and great-uncle. Although he also believes his father, who began his new business by baking around 400 doughnuts a day as opposed to the couple of dozen that LeBoeuf was producing, would have immediately had to have made some changes.
‘I’m sure he doctored it right away...’ he explained. ‘The proportions just don’t work the same.’
The doughnuts were a hit and Vernon and his uncle moved to Nashville, a far bigger city in Tennessee, to open a dedicated store, which they called the Krispy Kreme Doughnut Company.
By 1935 Vernon’s uncle wanted to retire back to Kentucky and sold on his share in the business to Vernon, who was only 20 years old at this point, and his father. A couple of years later and Vernon was ready to fully strike out on his own.
The legend goes that he was inspired to choose Winston-Salem as the spot for his new shop after staring idly at his pack of Camel cigarettes, which included the city’s name as part of its distinctive branding.
Whatever the truth, he took a doughnut-cutter and a salesman with him and opened his first small factory on July 13, 1937. At first they were hand-made by the dozen and sold wholesale to local stores, but the demand from locals, enticed by the saccharine smells coming from his building, persuaded him to also start selling directly to the public.
By 1946 he had seven stores. In those early days, if customers wanted hot doughnuts they would have to be at the shop between midnight and 4am — like most bakeries, they were made in the early hours of the morning. But Krispy Kreme then changed its production methods, and baking was done throughout the day.
In another clever marketing move, in 1992 fans of hot doughnuts were
More than 300 people queued from 4am Customers are alerted to hot batches
alerted to when fresh batches were available by a red neon sign outside that shop that would light up. A couple of years ago a Hot Light app was introduced by the company, allowing people to check their phones for when hot doughnuts are ready at their nearest store.
But this wasn’t their first innovation. Back in 1944, Vernon introduced display cases to show off his doughnuts. The top of them were wide and flat and served as the counter, making it easy for customers to choose from the various doughnuts available.
The company had set up a ‘laboratory’ in 1948, experimenting with new products and different types and flavours of doughnuts, adding to their original and simple glazed version.
And then in the 1950s his new shops began to be built with an interior glass wall, allowing customers to watch as the doughnuts were made.
In 1955, they settled on the current Krispy Kreme logo, designed by architect Benny Dinkins. The red, white and green branding is a bow-tie shape and has barely changed in almost 70 years.
By the 1960s the ever-growing company had changed the way its once handmade product was manufactured. Vernon’s engineers invented a machine that glazed the doughnuts by passing them under a waterfall of liquefied warm sugar — before that they had been hand-glazed in a galvanized wash tub.
They also opened a ‘mix plant’, where they developed a dry doughnut mix that would be delivered to each store. They also invented and built their own specialised doughnut-making equipment. Both the mix plant and machine manufacturing operations are still based in Winston-Salem.
A few years after Vernon died in 1973, Krispy Kreme merged with corporate giant Beatrice Foods Company of Chicago. It wasn’t a success. Beatrice began to mess with the original formula and introducing very different options on the menu.
When Krispy Kreme proved not to be as profitable as they had hoped it would be, Beatrice decided to sell it off and in 1981 a long-time Krispy Kreme employee, Joseph McAleer — who had been with the company for almost 30 years — decided to buy it back with a group of other franchise owners. Krispy Kreme returned to what it knew best, doughnuts.
The company opened its first international store in 2001 in Mississauga, Ontario in Canada, followed swiftly by another one in Quebec, Montreal.
There have been ups and downs in its fortunes — in the early noughties it blamed a dive in sales on the Atkins diet craze, although that excuse was greeted by some scepticism and economic experts suspected an over-enthusiastic expansion plan was probably more likely to blame.
But stores all over the world have continued to open. And often to the kind of perplexing madness witnessed in Dublin over the last two weeks. Although it would seem Ireland’s reaction to the new store has been particularly extraordinary, with reports on the opening appearing in The Washington Post and on Sky News.
This is not the first time the arrival of a Krispy Kreme outlet has caused such inexplicable hysteria. Indeed, it’s become something of a tradition when the company opens up a new store.
For instance in Tokyo, it was quite usual for punters to queue for over two hours when the store there was opened first. And when the first shop in Las Vegas opened its doors in 1998, it sold 72,000 doughnuts on the first day. By the end of the first week, it had shifted 360,000.
In 2014, that first day figure was surpassed with the store opening in Perth, Australia, when more than 73,200 doughnuts were sold.
As ambitious as the young Vernon Rudolph was, he could hardly have predicted that his humble sweet roll would one day attract an almost cult-like following.
It’s true that by the time he died in 1973, at the relatively young age of 58, his company was thriving, with about 70 shops throughout the American south-east.
By 2015, however, the company had opened its 1,000th store in Kansas City and now has branches all over the globe. Apart from Dublin, other international outlets that opened this year include Nigeria, Guatemala and New Zealand.
What began as a tiny family-run business with a secret recipe has become a phenomenon.
Dunkin’ Donuts may have more stores and a bigger turnover, but it’s Kripsy Kreme, with its retro branding, that has become firmly fixed in modern-day popular culture.
Madonna, Beyoncé and Barack Obama are all huge fans. Elvis was also known to have a weakness for them, while basketball star Shaquille O’Neal loves them so much he bought his own store in Atlanta.
The fried delicacy has featured heavily in hit TV shows like Ally McBeal and Sex in the City, as well as the Hollywood political satire Primary Colours, starring John Travolta — no stranger to doughnuts — and Emma Thompson.
Devotees insist it is the doughnuts themselves that draw the crowds. More measured opinion puts it down to good marketing and natural curiosity.
Regardless, Krispy Kreme bosses must be rubbing their hands in glee at the publicity they’ve garnered here already.
Although all this fuss could be short-lived. Just ask Dublin doughnut chain Aungier Danger. Once the ‘must-have’ sweet treat — at one stage it had three shops in the city — this summer it announced it was closing down.
It seems Irish people may be initially dazzled by bright, shiny sugar-coated rings of fried dough, but that passion can quickly turn dull...
Madonna, Beyoncé and Obama are fans