The King of Kreme

But consistency doesn't depend on lab instruments alone. Adjacent to the lab is a full-scale doughnut-making kitchen. Here, all day long, Betty Anders, 53, and Dorothy Chilton, 48 -- baking-lab technicians who also happen to be sisters -- make doughnuts. They make doughnuts from every single 2,500-pound batch of mix, making sure that each batch has been blended correctly. "That keeps surprises out of the field," says Kathy Duncan, 25, who supervises the analytical lab and the kitchen. Batches are rejected at a rate of about one per month. And the doughnuts that Anders and Chilton cook? They become pig feed.

Consistency requires patience as well: Krispy Kreme doughnuts don't taste quite right if the mix is used immediately. "The mix needs to season in the sack for at least a week," says Amanda Cook. Across an alley from Clarence Curry's mixing plant is a warehouse the size of a Home Depot. In it is everything necessary to run a Krispy Kreme doughnut shop -- from coffee stirrers and price signs to 45-pound tubs of lemon-custard filling. Mostly, though, the warehouse contains doughnut mix that is seasoning in brown 50-pound sacks. There are nine aisles of shelves, and each aisle is stacked two stories high. Each shelf contains two pallets, and each pallet contains 60 bags. It takes a lot of mix to make 11,000 dozen doughnuts every hour of every day.

The Kreme Dream

Sometimes, Krispy Kreme can seem dangerously close to overexposure. Although there are only 150 Krispy Kreme outlets (Dunkin' Donuts has 24 stores for every one Krispy Kreme outlet, and its sales are nearly 10 times as high), American culture is littered with references to Krispy Kreme. The 1998 Zagat Survey for New York City picked Krispy Kreme as the number-one best buy for a buck in the city. And Men's Journal named Krispy Kreme doughnuts 3rd on its list of the top 100 foods in the United States -- the only mass-market item to appear on the list.

And yet the buzz is mostly genuine: It comes from people eating doughnuts. The NATO base in Keflavik, Iceland has 350 boxes of Krispy Kremes shipped in by a C-130 from Virginia Beach every week, because that's what soldiers on the base want to eat. Krispy Kreme doughnuts produced $238 million in sales last year -- yet the company's brand-development department consists of just six people. Even more surprising, the company does no formal advertising.

Krispy Kreme hopes to have as many as 240 stores by 2003. (There are still 24 states that have no Krispy Kreme outlets.) But even as Krispy Kreme tries to grow, it remains true to the doughnuts of Vernon Rudolph.

The company has gone through some evolutionary stages. Three years after Rudolph died, Beatrice Foods bought Krispy Kreme. That started a period during which the stores sold things like ice cream and sausage biscuits, as well as doughnuts. The fabled equipment department was slowly closing its doors. The doughnut recipe changed. Eventually, the company was bought back by its horrified franchisees. A few days after that repurchase was complete, Vernon Rudolph's original recipe was reintroduced.

Like a talisman, what is purported to be the original recipe can still be found at Ivy Avenue, locked in a safe just a few steps from Vernon Rudolph's old office. The recipe came from Rudolph's uncle, who is said to have purchased it, along with the Krispy Kreme name, from a New Orleans chef named Joe LeBeau back in the 1930s.

Of course, the sacks of mix no longer match that original recipe -- which contained potato flour, for instance. But modern cooking equipment, the size of the company, and the vagaries of the wheat crop all require adjustments. "The recipe has to change for the doughnuts to stay the same," explains Mike Cecil.

But what about the doughnuts?

Carver Rudolph, one of Vernon Rudolph's five children, has been eating Krispy Kremes since he could eat. Family members no longer have any formal connection to the company. But they still eat the doughnuts.

Although Rudolph notes that the modern Krispy Kreme doughnut is "airier" than the ones that he ate when he was little, and that the doughnuts back then were hand-cut, he says that today's doughnuts are "virtually identical to those my dad made."

About those who currently manage the company, Rudolph says, "I think the idea of Krispy Kreme means more to them than money does. They really think those doughnuts are magic."

But, according to Carver Rudolph, his daddy always pooh-poohed the idea that there was anything special about the doughnuts. "When I asked him why the doughnuts were so successful, he'd say, 'Blood, sweat, and tears -- just hard work.' "

But Rudolph still keeps his bases covered. "Whenever somebody gets sick or dies, we go by the Krispy Kreme, pick up a couple dozen glazed, and drop them by the house," he says. "That's what we've always done."

Charles Fishman (cnfish@mindspring.com) is a Fast Company contributing editor. Visit Krispy Kreme on the Web (www.krispykreme.com).