07/15/2026
Interesting Facts!!
Our vote however is Bakers Dozen Donuts and Diner donuts.
Two men, two donuts, and thirteen years apart. This led to a war that has been raging across American breakfast tables for over 70 years.
Vernon Rudolph bought a secret yeast-raised doughnut recipe from a New Orleans French chef, rented a building in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and began selling Krispy Kreme doughnuts on July 13, 1937. He was so broke when he started that he and two friends had just $25 between them, borrowed ingredients from a kindly grocer, and delivered their first doughnuts in a 1936 Pontiac. The delicious scent of cooking doughnuts drifted into the street and passersby started stopping to ask if they could buy directly from him. So he cut a hole in an outside wall and started selling Original Glazed doughnuts directly to customers on the sidewalk. That hole in the wall in Winston-Salem is where one of the most recognisable food brands in the world began: Krispy Kreme.
Thirteen years later and 700 miles north, William (Bob) Rosenberg, who had been serving donuts and coffee to factory workers from mobile carts during World War II, opened the first Dunkin Donuts brick and mortar store in Quincy, Massachusetts in 1950. Where Krispy Kreme conquered the American South with its hot glazed yeast doughnut and the HOT NOW sign that stopped traffic, Dunkin conquered New England with coffee, variety, and sheer density of locations. For decades a safe distance separated the two camps. Dunkin flourished in the East while Krispy Kreme found success in the South. Eventually the buffer zone shrank and sometime in the early 1990s each one invaded the other's home territory and the war became national.
The philosophical divide between the two sides is genuinely interesting from a food history perspective. Krispy Kreme is a single-product obsession built around one perfect thing eaten hot off the line, a light, airy, yeast-raised glazed doughnut that has not meaningfully changed since a New Orleans French chef wrote the recipe on a slip of paper in the 1930s. Dunkin is a beverage company that also sells donuts, a coffee-first operation where the donut is a companion to the cup rather than the point of the visit. By the late 1950s, Dunkin had stores in twice as many states as Krispy Kreme and in 37 other countries, selling nearly five times as many doughnuts worldwide. Numbers that tell you which side is winning commercially and tell you nothing about which donut is actually better, which is an argument that can only be resolved in the comments section.
Krispy Kreme or Dunkin? And is the answer different depending on whether the HOT NOW sign is on?
-Donnie
eatshistory.com
