5 hours Ago
Not long ago it was announced that Young Buns Doughnuts in Mystic was shutting down. And while I don’t know the details of Young Buns’ departure, for many smaller doughnut (or donut) shops, it may be the old David and Goliath story. The donut business in Connecticut has never been a piece of cake, and becoming a publicly traded company in previous decades seems to have given Dunkin’ Donuts the deep pockets needed to fight for dominance in the tubular pastry biz.
Because the owners of many other donut shops and chains, once common in Connecticut, have long since hung up their aprons. While Mister Donut still exists in Asia, Dunkin absorbed most of those stateside long ago. Bess Eaton and the Whole Donut are all but gone too and appear to be, in Connecticut, down to one and none respectively.
Even their most recent rival, Krispy Kreme , came and went quickly after having their lunch eaten by Dunkin’ – with Krispy Kreme now operating just one location at the Mohegan Sun complex. Krispy Kreme did announce, however, that we can expect McDonalds to offer products “nationwide in 2026”– so we’ll see And while many local shops remain, like the mostly shore-based Donut Crazy, their competition is the now monstrous-size Dunkin’, with over 470 Connecticut outlets. Dunkin’ Donuts has, for some time now, been transitioning to the name of simply Dunkin’.
Had one not known better, one might think Dunkin was an alternate spelling of the owner’s name, like cake mixologist Duncan Hines or table and chair mixologist Duncan Phyfe. But with nearly 13,000 stores globally, one does know better. This change seems to have started when the owners at that time, The Carlyle Group, Bain Capital and others, realized their competition was Starbucks and not Krispy Kreme.
Not only is the big money in high-priced coffee, but it seems clear that increasingly health-conscious America offered little growth in the white flour, sugar, and oil game. Indeed, a brief googling turned up no white flour, sugar, and oil diet fad I’d missed. So focusing on coffee may have been the best way for Dunkin’s Donuts to fall jelly side up in the 21st century.
And this move away from being donut-centric was continued by its current owners, Roark Capital Group (named after Howard Roark, Ayn Rand’s protagonist in “The Fountainhead“ ). Dunkin’ is part of Roark’s “Inspire Brands” that include Baskin-Robbins, Arby’s, Sonic Drive-In, Buffalo Wild Wings, and Jimmy John’s. Outside of Inspire, Roark also owns Subway, The Cheesecake Factory, Wingstop, Carl’s Jr.
and others. And Roark controls many other well-known and lesser-known firms that have nothing to do with the restaurant biz as well. And so Dunkin’ (nee Dunkin’ Donuts) is yet another cog in the machinery of retail consolidation that puts the big boys on top and makes mom and pops flops.
But there’s nothing new about this. It’s been a trend for decades. What does bug me about the name rebranding though is that the whole hole notion of doughnut-dunking will fade too.
And then a thing that was once something will soon no longer be anything. I guess that’s the nature of life, aging, and the passing of time. Stuff is something until it later becomes nothing.
But doughnut dunking was a big thing for a long while. And it was, to my memory and to my mind, done with what are now called “old-fashioned” doughnuts. With origins generally thought to arise from the Dutch settlers’ olykoeks (or “oily cakes”), it would appear that the doughnut’s ancestors were yeast-risen affairs.
But with baking powder’s invention in the mid-19th century, the cake style quickly became dominant by far. What is also clear is that the more dense, heavier cake type is a superior dunking donut, since modern yeast donuts are little more than circular voids with just enough flour to give the sugar and air structure. And a dunked yeast doughnut, having so little bulk, just sort of dissolves into a wheaty sugary mush.
And so, it is the cake style donut, “the old-fashioned,” that was the prime dunker. Indeed, the original Dunkin’ Donut was somehow made with a little knob on its round body, as a dunking handle of sorts. This cake type was the sort fed to train and trench weary doughboys by Great War doughnut lassies (or doughnut dollies, depending) and flour, baking powder, sugar, and lard were all in good supply for the duration.
The airy, yeast-style doughnut, so common today, wasn’t all that common until after Krispy Kreme came about in the late ‘30s and until after WW II in general. In spite of their commercial featuring Michael Vale’s Fred the Baker lamenting that it was again “time to make the donuts,” many Dunkin’s no longer fry in-house. Dunkins are franchisee affairs and while some still make them at their individual shops, it seems it is also common that a franchise, or group of them, might now distribute from a central “bakery.
” Meanwhile, some locations, a former worker wrote, apparently now get them frozen. Anyhow, to repeat myself and get back on-point, I am noting here that a cultural thing, donut dunking, that was something is passing on and evaporating. And how much was it something, might the reader ask? Quite a lot I’d say, and below I’ve listed a few references I know from films: An early Shirley Temple short called Dora’s Dunkin Donuts , from 1933, in which Dora’s special doughnuts are shown to have superior coffee soaking properties when dunked.
In 1934, we find working man Clark Gable making a hole megillah of schooling sophisticated Claudette Colbert proper dunking technique in “It Happened One Night.” 1940 finds James Stewart’s incognito Alfred Kralik asking why Margaret Sullavan’s Klara Novak shouldn’t be dunking as she awaits her unknown prince in “ The Shop Around the Corner.” Sullavan is not yet PO’ed that her PO Box lover was a no-show.
Dunking was so common that doughnuts came to be called sinkers, as in 1941 when in “Sullivan’s Travels” Joel McCrea fends off lovely Veronica Lake’s offer of ham and eggs with “A cup of coffee and a sinker will fix me up fine.” So here, and for what it’s worth (which isn’t much), I’m merely noting another little shift and another little movement within our culture. And I guess that’s all that time is, just one little shift after another until the past is gone and forgotten and replaced with a different now.
Jody Mamone is a writer who grew up in CT. She is at [email protected] and substack.
com/@jodymamone.
