The King of Kreme

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.

The Temple of Doughnuts

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.