Holey crusade: Krispy Kreme boss Jamie Dunning on his mission to freshen up the brand

In a small room, two floors above Krispy Kreme’s ‘Hotlight’ store in the bustling heart of Oxford Street, a tray of doughnuts gleam in the fluorescent downlighting. They have been freshly glazed and are hot off the production line at the back of the store downstairs.  

At Krispy Kreme, these famous glazed doughnuts are referred to simply as ‘OG’ – which stands for ‘original glazed’. They are the brand’s pride and joy.  

They are also the only product to be found in every single one of Krispy Kreme’s more than 13,000 stores and locations in 35 countries globally.  

The OG forms the basis for all the myriad different flavours and products Krispy Kreme brings to market in limited ranges every three weeks in the UK alone.  

It’s late July, and the doughnut giant has just rolled out a new range to celebrate the Olympics in Paris, having only weeks before brought out a range to coincide with Euro 2024. 

But today, Krispy Kreme’s president and CEO of the UK and Ireland, Jamie Dunning, has his mind on an even more ambitious undertaking. 

“We’re clear that we’re all about the OG doughnuts you can buy from us,” he says. “But we felt that it was time to do something fundamental. To make some changes.”

On August 12, Krispy Kreme will be rolling out six new doughnuts across its entire UK estate. “It’s going to be the biggest brand refresh in our history,” Dunning says, proudly.  

“A 50% refresh of our product range, being implemented across the country overnight. It’s a huge challenge for everyone, but it’s one we can overcome. It’s also the right time to do it.”

Getting hundreds of thousands of new products into these cabinets in a single night sounds like a logistical nightmare. So why now and why all at once? 

“Candidly, I think we had a bit of catching up to do. We’re an earned media brand today and there’s a big clamour for consumer attention out there,” Dunning says. “Anything more humble or discrete than a big brand refresh might not have grabbed attention.”

The customers Dunning wants to appeal to are the younger Gen Z demographic. “A big chunk of this demographic has become meaningful spenders over the last few years,” he says.  

“They now represent about half of our consumer audience and they talk of a high level of expectation on flavour variety, colour variety and products that photograph well on social media.”

“People ask me: why would you want to run a rewards programme when your customer frequency is three or four times a year? The point is, it suits our sense of generosity”

So, we return to the tray of doughnuts and the accouterments laid around them. Dunning has invited me to have a go at making one of the new ranges: the Blueberry Bubble Bliss.  

Tentatively, like I’ve been shown, I pick up one of the still-warm OG’s, flip it and dip it into the saccharine pink icing. Before the icing begins to harden, I shakily pipe a floret of cream into the hole and finally sprinkle a few shiny blueberry bubbles over top. 

Dunning studies my effort. It sits next to a perfect demonstration doughnut, decorated in line with Krispy Kreme’s exacting standards: the sides are even, the icing sits uniformly around the fryer line, the cream perfectly occludes the hole and there is an even number of bubbles applied to the top.   

By comparison, mine is warped with finger marks and the icing has run down to collect in sticky pools on the table. Somehow there’s both not enough cream in the centre and too many bubbles on the top.  

“Not bad,” Dunning says, evenly. “Although, there’s a little bit of wastage. Our decorators can churn out a perfectly identical doughnut like these every few seconds. It’s not as easy as it looks, is it?” 

But this isn’t a spot of home baking. This is big business and every ounce of flour and granule of sugar is exactingly weighed and measured. 

While much of the frying process for Krispy Kreme is automated, human errors like spilled icing and melting cream cost money.  

The humble doughnut may not enjoy the ubiquity in the UK that they do in the brand’s American heartland, but they are becoming increasingly popular and the competition is growing.

Everyone from the big four grocers to household bakery names like Greggs are expanding their doughnut ranges. Home-grown specialist competitors such as Crosstown and international players like Tim Horton are also expanding into this space and trying to undercut Krispy Kreme on price. 

Is Dunning worried? “I’m a big fan of competition,” he says. “It drives us to keep innovating and raising the bar. Besides, no one else offers the quality of product we do.  

“We’re slightly more expensive than other doughnut brands and that’s something we’re comfortable with. You get what you pay for in terms of the quality of the products and the freshness of it. There’s no other brand anywhere that’s making tomorrow’s doughnuts from fresh dough.” 

Krispy Kreme’s higher price point also reflects the fact that, compared to the competition, it has a relatively low frequency in terms of repeat customers.  

“On average, our customers shop with us three to four times a year,” Dunning explains. “Seventy per cent of that is shared and what was predominantly a dozen box pre-Covid is now being evenly spread across different box sizes. Primarily because of there not being as big an office economy as there was.”

In short, Krispy Kreme customers shop with the brand when they are in the mood to gift. As such, the business has leaned heavily into loyalty as a means of fostering a sense of community with a customer base who might otherwise feel disconnected.  

“I had to win people over on opening the store on Oxford Street, instead of somewhere perhaps more obvious like Piccadilly Circus or Leicester Square”

Its Krispy Kreme Rewards loyalty scheme was launched in 2020, two years before Dunning joined the brand in 2022. However, he has put it front and centre of his longer-term strategy.  

Members are offered discounts in-store at certain key times of the year, such as Christmas and Mother’s Day, and can accrue points to spend or share with other members. They are also given a free OG doughnut on their birthday.    

“People ask me: why would you want to run a rewards programme when your customer frequency is three or four times a year? The point is, it suits our sense of generosity,” he says.

“It’s not a lever of high frequency for us. We’re not interested in trying to compete with offering rewards on a daily or weekly basis. It’s just about making the app an integrated part of the customer’s relationship with Krispy Kreme.”

It’s an approach that’s paying off. While Dunning won’t share exact figures, he says in terms of total members across the UK, Krispy Kreme has massively outperformed much larger brands.

“Relative to our brand size, the membership base that we have is outstanding. We’re talking to within a decimal fraction of some of the biggest brands in the UK,” he insists. “I think we overpunch by about tenfold.”

It’s odd to think of a brand that looms as large in its category as Krispy Kreme as being a relative minnow but that’s the reality for it in the UK.  

Krispy Kreme has only around 120 standalone stores in the country. Greggs, by comparison, has over 2,400 and is growing that number all the time.

Through retail partnerships with everyone from supermarket giants like Tesco to service stations and even tie-ups with holiday destinations like Center Parcs, Krispy Kreme has spread its reach to around 1,400 points of sale around the country.  

As the man who formerly headed up M&M’s World – the multi-storey megastore in London’s Leicester Square – Dunning is no stranger to the importance of good stores in prime locations.  

He won’t rule out new stores for Krispy Kreme and says the Oxford Street store is a good indication of the formats the brand will look at in the future.

“I had to win people over on the choice of opening the store here, instead of somewhere perhaps more obvious like Piccadilly Circus or Leicester Square,” he says.

“But I felt this was the perfect spot. With a new store, the onus is on us to keep raising our game, to consider our locations not just as sources of revenue but as places that engage, entertain and immerse our customers. Whether they come in for one doughnut or a dozen”.