Does Krispy Kreme Still Use Its Original Donut Recipe From The 1930s?

If you've ever arrived at a Krispy Kreme when the red neon "Hot Light" sign in the window is glowing, you know that you just lucked into a tasty tradition that's hard to beat. The sign indicates a fresh, hot batch of its original glazed donuts is coming off the conveyer belt. And while today the donut you're scarfing down is made using the same recipe that the donut chain started out with back in the 1930s, there was a decade-long period in the past when that wasn't true. 

Vernon Rudolph officially founded Krispy Kreme in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in 1937, but this donut chain's roots, and its glazed donut recipe, go further back. Four years earlier, in 1933, an entrepreneur named Ishmael Armstrong began selling donuts in Paducah, Kentucky, at his general store using a recipe with very mysterious origins. The canonical version is that Armstrong bought a donut shop there from a New Orleans chef named Joseph LeBeau who gave him the donut recipe as part of the deal. Only there was no LeBeau or donut shop. The likeliest explanation is that Armstrong got the recipe from a Louisiana-born Army Corps of Engineers cook named Joseph LeBoeuf, who probably gave the recipe away for free. 

After a few false starts due to the Great Depression, Vernon Rudolph, who was Ishmael Armstrong's nephew, opened up a Krispy Kreme in Winston-Salem using a version of Joseph LeBoeuf's yeast-raised donut recipe. Rudolph and his donut business eventually became a huge success. LeBoeuf's original recipe included fluffed egg whites, sugar, shortening, skim milk, and mashed potatoes. Yes, mashed potatoes — just one of the odd facts about Krispy Kreme. It's believed Rudolph altered the recipe early on. What he may have changed about the recipe is a closely guarded secret and remained the go-to Krispy Kreme donut recipe until around 1976.

Rudolph died in 1973, and three years later, his family sold the company to Beatrice Foods Co. of Chicago. Beatrice Foods changed the brand's donut recipe as a cost-cutting measure, among other modifications, but in 1982, those changes were reversed. A group of Krispy Kreme franchisees, headed by Joe McAleer — who had been with the company since the 1950s — bought Krispy Kreme. "We are going to try to get back to where we feel we ought to be ... we want to return to the practice of the proven methods which we feel are best for the company," McAleer told The Sentinel in 1982 after the buyout. From then on, the original recipe has remained. And so when you bite into a Krispy Kreme glazed donut, you're tasting a history that goes back nearly 100 years.