Chain bakeries don’t often attract hours-long queues. But when Krispy Kreme’s first Irish store opened in a Dublin suburb, tailbacks at its 24-hour drive-through went on so late into the night it had to scale back its opening times. People even queued for three hours at the ribbon-cutting of a new Krispy Kreme shopping centre kiosk in Kent.
The company is not selling anything particularly groundbreaking or exclusive. It’s among dozens of doughnut brands, from the hipster Crosstown to global giant Dunkin’, that consumers can choose from today. Its treats are also sold in more than 1,000 supermarkets and petrol stations across the UK and Ireland. So what's behind the hype?
“Krispy Kreme is one of those brands that to some degree you might call alchemistic,” says the company’s UK and Ireland president, Jamie Dunning, by way of explanation. “You do not know what has gone into it to make it what it is.”