We want Krispy Kreme... We want Krispy Kreme...
Posted on 04/01/2002 5:04:03 PM PST by SamAdams76
The hodgepodge of old brick buildings on the east side of Winston-Salem, North Carolina doesn't look like the source of half a century of magic. Tucked away on Ivy Avenue, the buildings look like what they are: old factory spaces in a declining neighborhood, where people still make an old product in an old way.
And yet, when Jennifer Tilly showed up at this year's Kentucky Derby with some of Ivy Avenue's best, it made news. When Lauren Bacall slipped into the Upper West Side boutique that sells Ivy Avenue's product, the New York tabloids took note. Last January, when the first store carrying Ivy Avenue's output opened in Los Angeles, people drove from more than 50 miles away to stand in line. And in an interview that was part of the flirt-and-flash publicity for her film Eyes Wide Shut, Nicole Kidman confessed that while Tom is wonderful, what really makes her weak in the knees comes from Ivy Avenue: doughnuts.
Krispy Kreme doughnuts.
Hot Krispy Kreme doughnuts.
The glaze so delicate that it melts under your fingers as you pick up a Krispy Kreme. The doughnuts so airy that lifting one without denting it is impossible. The mood in a Krispy Kreme store so evocative, you can't enter without smiling.
All 150 Krispy Kreme stores make their doughnuts out in the open, where you can watch. An orderly parade of doughnuts floats through the fryer, flipping over automatically halfway through the cooking process. Then a conveyor whisks the doughnuts out of the hot shortening and into a glistening cascade of glaze.
These are not donuts. They're doughnuts.
But what goes on at the store level is part of the mystery and the sleight of hand of Krispy Kreme -- because, although it takes months to learn to make a Krispy Kreme doughnut, what happens in each store is only the finale of a carefully choreographed process that is completely controlled from within those brick buildings on Ivy Avenue.
Americans treat themselves to Krispy Kreme doughnuts at a fantastic pace: 11,000 dozen doughnuts are sold every hour -- more than 3 million melt-in-your-mouth Krispy Kremes a day. Every one of those doughnuts traces its origins to the same place. The doughnuts may be kneaded, fried, and filled in a store in Charleston, West Virginia, or Omaha, Nebraska, or Dothan, Alabama, but every container of doughnut mix, icing, and raspberry filling comes by truck from Ivy Avenue. Even the stainless-steel equipment used to turn the ingredients into doughnuts comes from Ivy Avenue: The fryers, the conveyors, the proofing boxes are all handcrafted in the facility's metal shop.
If there is a chief wizard of Krispy Kreme, it is Clarence Curry. Curry, 61, has been at Krispy Kreme for 33 years; he started back when the founder himself strode the halls. Curry's title is director of the mix department. His crews create and control the mix from which every Krispy Kreme doughnut is made. Curry's world is a blend of tradition and technology -- one in service of the other. As a company, Krispy Kreme has one overriding goal: consistency. It wants a doughnut purchased in Scranton, Pennsylvania to taste exactly like a doughnut purchased in Las Vegas. And it wants a doughnut eaten on July 13, 1999 to taste exactly like a doughnut eaten on July 13, 1959. "The product never tricks you," says Mike Cecil, 55, Krispy Kreme's "minister of culture." But that consistency is harder to sustain than it seems. It requires vigilance. It even requires change.
In 1966, when Curry first started working at Krispy Kreme, ingredients were still measured by hand on bench scales, still blended by hand, still poured into 100-pound sacks. But founder Vernon Rudolph -- who fried his first doughnuts in Winston-Salem on July 13, 1937 -- was no Luddite.
"Mr. Rudolph put that panel in on the third floor," Curry remembers. "That panel" refers to the company's first computerized batching system, which used punch cards and a card reader. The next generation of technology used tape. If a computer lost track of the recipe, says Curry, "it could take half a day to reload the tapes." But the computers provided consistency, and Rudolph's company flourished across the South.
Ivy Avenue is so obsessed with consistency that before each batch of wheat flour is allowed into the building, a sample is tested in a second-floor lab. When the big hopper trucks pull up to the loading dock -- as they do half a dozen times a day -- someone climbs up and takes a four-foot-long core sample from each delivery. "We do a quick check for moisture content, protein, and ash, using an infrared tester," says Amanda Cook, 26, a food technologist who works in the lab. Wheat crops vary; the doughnuts cannot. In fact, all of the raw ingredients are tested before being accepted -- shortening, flour, sugars. "It's not just taste," says Cook. "It's chemistry." If a 25-ton truckload of flour falls outside of established parameters, the entire delivery is rejected. All 25 tons go back. That happens every couple of months.
But consistency doesn't depend on lab instruments alone. Adjacent to the lab is a full-scale doughnut-making kitchen. Here, all day long, Betty Anders, 53, and Dorothy Chilton, 48 -- baking-lab technicians who also happen to be sisters -- make doughnuts. They make doughnuts from every single 2,500-pound batch of mix, making sure that each batch has been blended correctly. "That keeps surprises out of the field," says Kathy Duncan, 25, who supervises the analytical lab and the kitchen. Batches are rejected at a rate of about one per month. And the doughnuts that Anders and Chilton cook? They become pig feed.
Consistency requires patience as well: Krispy Kreme doughnuts don't taste quite right if the mix is used immediately. "The mix needs to season in the sack for at least a week," says Amanda Cook. Across an alley from Clarence Curry's mixing plant is a warehouse the size of a Home Depot. In it is everything necessary to run a Krispy Kreme doughnut shop -- from coffee stirrers and price signs to 45-pound tubs of lemon-custard filling. Mostly, though, the warehouse contains doughnut mix that is seasoning in brown 50-pound sacks. There are nine aisles of shelves, and each aisle is stacked two stories high. Each shelf contains two pallets, and each pallet contains 60 bags. It takes a lot of mix to make 11,000 dozen doughnuts every hour of every day.
Sometimes, Krispy Kreme can seem dangerously close to overexposure. Although there are only 150 Krispy Kreme outlets ( Dunkin' Donuts has 24 stores for every one Krispy Kreme outlet, and its sales are nearly 10 times as high ), American culture is littered with references to Krispy Kreme. The 1998 Zagat Survey for New York City picked Krispy Kreme as the number-one best buy for a buck in the city. And Men's Journal named Krispy Kreme doughnuts 3rd on its list of the top 100 foods in the United States -- the only mass-market item to appear on the list.
And yet the buzz is mostly genuine: It comes from people eating doughnuts. The NATO base in Keflavik, Iceland has 350 boxes of Krispy Kremes shipped in by a C-130 from Virginia Beach every week, because that's what soldiers on the base want to eat. Krispy Kreme doughnuts produced $238 million in sales last year -- yet the company's brand-development department consists of just six people. Even more surprising, the company does no formal advertising.
Krispy Kreme hopes to have as many as 240 stores by 2003. ( There are still 24 states that have no Krispy Kreme outlets. ) But even as Krispy Kreme tries to grow, it remains true to the doughnuts of Vernon Rudolph.
The company has gone through some evolutionary stages. Three years after Rudolph died, Beatrice Foods bought Krispy Kreme. That started a period during which the stores sold things like ice cream and sausage biscuits, as well as doughnuts. The fabled equipment department was slowly closing its doors. The doughnut recipe changed. Eventually, the company was bought back by its horrified franchisees. A few days after that repurchase was complete, Vernon Rudolph's original recipe was reintroduced.
Like a talisman, what is purported to be the original recipe can still be found at Ivy Avenue, locked in a safe just a few steps from Vernon Rudolph's old office. The recipe came from Rudolph's uncle, who is said to have purchased it, along with the Krispy Kreme name, from a New Orleans chef named Joe LeBeau back in the 1930s.
Of course, the sacks of mix no longer match that original recipe -- which contained potato flour, for instance. But modern cooking equipment, the size of the company, and the vagaries of the wheat crop all require adjustments. "The recipe has to change for the doughnuts to stay the same," explains Mike Cecil.
But what about the doughnuts?
Carver Rudolph, one of Vernon Rudolph's five children, has been eating Krispy Kremes since he could eat. Family members no longer have any formal connection to the company. But they still eat the doughnuts.
Although Rudolph notes that the modern Krispy Kreme doughnut is "airier" than the ones that he ate when he was little, and that the doughnuts back then were hand-cut, he says that today's doughnuts are "virtually identical to those my dad made."
About those who currently manage the company, Rudolph says, "I think the idea of Krispy Kreme means more to them than money does. They really think those doughnuts are magic."
But, according to Carver Rudolph, his daddy always pooh-poohed the idea that there was anything special about the doughnuts. "When I asked him why the doughnuts were so successful, he'd say, 'Blood, sweat, and tears -- just hard work.' "
But Rudolph still keeps his bases covered. "Whenever somebody gets sick or dies, we go by the Krispy Kreme, pick up a couple dozen glazed, and drop them by the house," he says. "That's what we've always done."
I never had a Krispy Kreme donut. Until last week. But more on that later.
I am a Dunkin' Donuts fanatic. For not so much the donuts but for the coffee. I have stopped at Dunkin' Donuts virtually every morning for the past 15 years of my life, the only very few exceptions being on several Christmas mornings and when I am on business trips. In fact, I remember a Christmas morning when I drove around for an hour and a half looking for a Dunkin' Donuts that was open. I finally found one, but man, was my wife pissed when I got home!
There is nothing better than a Dunkin' Donuts coffee. I've tried brewing it at home and I just can't get it to taste the same. I've even bought the most expensive coffee makers I could buy and used the Dunkin' Donuts coffee beans. I can get it close but it's just not the same as store-bought. I turn my nose up at just about every type of coffee. So I am a diehard Dunkin' Donuts fan - oh yeah, the donuts are pretty good too.
So you can imagine my surprise reading all these articles last summer about this Krispy Kreme that was about to invade the New England market and how Dunkin' Donuts was being thrown into a panic over it. I found that kind of humorous given the fact that Krispy Kreme is a puny chain, with only about 150 stores nationwide. By contrast, Dunkin Donuts has over 5,000 stores worldwide. Being a lifelong New Englander, I have never even seen a Krispy Kreme store. So I was looking forward to seeing one open up in my area so that I could see what all the fuss was about.
Well, one hasn't opened around here yet. But when I went to Orlando last week, in the restaurant area of my hotel was Krispy Kreme donuts! Not a store, but apparently the hotel had some kind of deal worked out where they would get a few dozen shipped in every morning for their guests. So I grabbed three donuts and snuck them to my room (no way am I going to eat donuts with other people around). I got a regular (classic) Krispy Kreme, a chocolate frosted and a blackberry filled. Well, now I know why Dunkin' Donuts is so worried. I practically inhaled them. Dunkin' Donuts isn't even in the same ballpark with these donuts. I wasn't able to try to Krispy Kreme's coffee, but if it is close to being as good as Dunkin' Donuts, I will have to reroute my commute every morning!
No, Sam, I'm afraid you still don't understand.
You have not really had Krispy Kreme doughnuts until you have experienced the Hot Doughnuts Now sign. For that you must go directly to Krispy Kreme, not anywhere where they are "shipped in."
Oh man....are you in for a treat!
I guess the best description for the difference in "store bought" vs. "hot & fresh" is cold pizza out of the fridge the next day.
Yeah....its good....but different.
BTW....the ONLY KK doughnut is the glazed.
All that "jelly filled" crap is strickly to keep the Yankees (begging your pardon) happy.
Be sure to get extra napkins 'cause licking your fingers just won't get all the CLEAR, runny sugar (it hasn't turn into a milky white 'crust' yet as the boxed ones do) from getting all over your hands and drooling down the sides of your mouth.
They are also so light that chewing is optional.
Grandma's gums work just as well.
Once you've had them, you'll never go back. Don't get me wrong, I like Dunkin' Donuts too, and their coffee is great. But Krispy Kreme is the fine dining of doughnuts.
The last time I bought a hot dozen of Krispy Kremes, by the time I got home the kids had to settle for licking the box.
Krispy Kremes will always signify Clintoon food to me.
I won't touch the stuff. Gimme Dunkin' Domnuts anytime.
Oh i agree with this! i stop every single morning for DD coffee. it is better than any starbucks or foofy coffee on the planet. But there we part ways, sam. i don't like KK donuts! they are quite easy to come by in suburban DC, people bring them to staff meetings, as if they are serving a delicacy. i do not see the attraction. i am DD through and through!
Now, I know, there is a Krispy Kreme doughnut shop in Issaquah Washington, which is closer to Seattle than where we live in Olympia
But in a few weeks we are going up to Seattle for three days, and I am sure, we will then be much closer to Issaquah, and one of our goals is to venture over to the new Krispy Kreme and finally know what everyone is talking about....of course, we will have to get them hot, to begin with, but am sure we will be taking a few dozen home with us...
I can hardly wait for this new taste adventure...
Well, Sam, if you live in Providence RI, you will have a chance to try Hot Doughnuts Now.
The Jan companies, that have numerous Burger Kings, Newport Cremery, and others penned a deal with Krispy last year to attack DD on their home turf as a strategic alliance.
The Jan Co. has purchased a site near the intersection of Rt. 95 and Rt 37, to convert into an ice cream/Krispy Kreme plant, operational sometime in late 2002.
This is the first time that KK has formed a strategic alliance with a franchiser. Up until now, KK has sold off area development rights -So. California was sold for $25k, with the understanding that the franchiser build out the area with x number of factories over a number of years, (I think it was six.) Compare that to DD, in which your franchise fee covers a street corner. Each plant costs about $400k after the build-out.
Each doughnut machine spits out 300 dozen doughnuts an hour, so KK thrives on both walk-in retail business, but most importantly back door deliveries to the surrounding retail outlets.
Actually, the dough is not the same after all these years. About five years ago, they changed the formula which expanded the shelf life from one day to two days, dramatically expanding the back door business possibilities.
Great product, but lackluster profits based on the cult status of the product
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