Ever wonder about the history of Krispy Kreme Doughnuts? Our own Bon bon Queen Charlene Dupray of South 'n France tells the tale.

Ah, the sweet smell of success!  It’s been very sweet for one North Carolina-based company, Krispy Kreme Doughnuts.  Anyone who knows me knows that I love a good story, and the tale behind Krispy Kreme’s success has all of the elements of a classic.  The yarn is part Southern epic (think Gone with the Wind meets doughnut theater) and part sophisticated yet homey marketing fable that tells how one of the hottest brands in the country was created.  

The Rhett Butler of Krispy Kreme was a man named Vernon Rudolph.  In the early 1930’s, he bought a secret recipe for yeast doughnuts from a French pastry chef in New Orleans (one of Pascal’s long-lost ancestors, perhaps?), along with some old equipment.  In 1937, he moved to Winston-Salem with some friends, the equipment, and $25 dollars in cash.  His plan was to open a wholesale business selling to local grocery stores.  He and his partners used their last $25 dollars to rent a building in Old Salem.  With no money left to buy ingredients, Rudolph convinced a nearby grocer to lend him ingredients in return for payment once the first doughnuts were sold.   

As the saying goes, necessity breeds ingenuity, and Vernon Rudolph had plenty. Needing a way to deliver his doughnuts to clients, he took the back seat out of his Pontiac and installed a delivery rack.  Not long after he made his first batch of doughnuts on July 13, 1937, ingenuity struck again.  The aroma wafting from his little doughnut factory was so enticing, folks walking by the Krispy Kreme doughnut plant began pounding on his door asking whether they could buy hot doughnuts.  It didn’t take long for Rudolph to cut a hole in the factory wall and sell doughnuts from his new window to customers on the street.

The business grew rapidly.  In the 1950’s Krispy Kreme mechanized the doughnut-making process, revolutionized production, and continued its upward trajectory for twenty more years.  In 1973, Vernon Rudolph died, and a dark era ensued.  Krispy Kreme was sold, and the parent company made lots of bad choices on behalf of the doughnut group, including changing their logo and the recipe!  The company started registering losses, and ten years later they were heavily saddled with problems, including an enormous debt.