a donutSpudnut
also: potato donut
A word somebody trademarked, and the shops that still use it earned it.
A donut made with potato flour or mashed potato in the dough. Softer crumb, longer shelf life, and a faint savoury note under the sugar.
The story Cited · wp-spudnut-shops
Al and Bob Pelton of Salt Lake City ate potato doughnuts in Germany, then worked through wheat dough flavoured with potato water and mashed potato before landing on a dry potato mix that could be shipped — which is what made a franchise possible. They coined the word spudnut and opened in 1940.
The chain moved fast. Franchising began in 1946; in 1948 a new franchisee paid fifty dollars plus the cost of a hundred sacks of spudnut flour; by mid-1949 there were more than 225 shops in 31 states, more than 300 in 38 states by 1954, and 315 by 1968. The advertising ran "Coast to coast… Alaska to Mexico", with a cartoon Mr. Spudnut in parades.
The parent company is gone. Independent shops still trading under the name are the survivors of that system, not a chain.
How it is done Cited · wp-spudnut-shops
Potato flour or riced potato into a yeast dough, proofed, cut and fried like any raised ring.
Today Inference
A Spudnut sign is a dated object: it marks a shop that bought into a franchise that no longer exists and kept the name.
The particulars
| dough | potato |
|---|---|
| finish | glazed |
| region | Utah, The Mountain West, The United States |
| confidence | high · updated 2026-09-16 |
Who it runs with
Who talks about it
Where we got it
- Spudnut Shops — Wikipedia · link
Where it came from: Cited a source we name · Harvested pulled from an open dataset · Tradition what the tradition says, hedged · Inference this project's reasoning · Field somebody stood there. This record as JSON.