Donut Makers Pull Out All Stops to Keep US #1

CANTON, Mass.  This town of 20,000 south of Boston is home to Dunkin’ Donuts University, the institute of higher learning where future managers of the national franchise have received training in the fine art of making donuts since 1966.

DDU Students:  “I don’t know–I guess I’d say the Chocolate Sprinkled is my favorite.”

The school’s emphasis on undergraduate education is being replaced by a more serious approach to donutology, however, as professors attempt to maintain the donut’s status as the world’s breakfast snack of choice.  

Stacks in the library.

“If we just sit on our duffs we’ll be crushed by foreign foods such as croissants and brioches,” says Dean of Students Colin McKenzie.  “We need to be doing more basic research if we’re going to remain number one.”

A way of life is threatened

The same sense of urgency is felt across the border in Oakville, Ontario, where Tim Hortons, the US-Canadian donut giant, has spent $43 million on a high-speed sprinkle accelerator that the company says will produce the world’s first “super donut” in early 2009.  “There’s a struggle going on right now for the soul and stomach of the world,” says Oren Muller, a donut industry analyst for Brevard Securities in New York.  “There will be winners and losers, and the creme filling will run in the streets.”

Prototype of “super donut”.

A donut (also spelled “doughnut”) is a sweet, deep-fried lump of dough that takes one of two forms; the “filled” donut, a flattened sphere injected with jam, jelly, cream or custard, and the more popular ring-shaped variety.  The void in the center of a ring donut is often referred to as a donut “hole”.

Allen Mendelsohn, the Rosenfeld Professor of History at Dunkin’ Donuts University, says that the perennially popular food item was introduced to America by Dutch settlers who fled culinary persecution in Europe.  “The Dutch started the Dessert Renaissance,” he explains to a visitor at the sprawling DDU campus.  “They invented cookies, cream pie and cobbler, which aroused the suspicions of skinny Calvinist religious authorities.”   As proof of his theory, he notes that in the northern Europe doughnuts are referred to by the Dutch word “olykoeks,” meaning “big butt”.

“I didn’t have nothin’ better to do, so I came down here to stand in line.”

Krispy Kreme, the other member of the American donut industry’s “Big Three” says it is prepared to do whatever is necessary to maintain the donut’s dominance over the breakfast pastries of other nations.  “We’re going to work with other donut makers to maintain America’s hegemony,” says Furman Austin, a senior vice president at the Winston-Salem, North Carolina-based company.  “I just wish somebody would tell me what the hell ‘hegemony’ means.”

Copyright 2007, Con Chapman