a long oneThe franchise that vanished

Between 1940 and 1968 a Salt Lake City potato-flour company put more than three hundred shops on American streets. The company is gone. Some of the shops are not.

Al and Bob Pelton ate potato doughnuts in Germany and worked their way from wheat dough flavoured with potato water, through mashed potato, to a dry potato mix. The mix is the invention: it made the recipe shippable, and a shippable recipe can be franchised. They coined the word spudnut and opened in 1940.

Franchising began in 1946. In 1948 a new franchisee paid $50 plus the cost of a hundred sacks of spudnut flour. By 1952 a franchise cost $1,750 plus equipment, about $5,000 all in — roughly $109,550 in 2024 dollars — and the Peltons were on the cover of Mechanix Illustrated under the headline "Their Potatoes Make Dough".

Over 200 shops by 1948. More than 225 in 31 states by mid-1949. More than 300 in 38 states by 1954. 315 by 1968. The advertising ran "Coast to coast… Alaska to Mexico", with a cartoon Mr. Spudnut in parades.

The parent company no longer exists. Independent shops still trade under the name.

Inference — that is the most common shape of survival in this trade. Daylight Donuts, the Tulsa mix company founded in 1954, still supplies roughly 950 independently owned shops; if it went tomorrow the signs would stay up and the shops would keep frying. The infrastructure of American donuts is mostly flour suppliers and second-hand equipment, and both outlive their companies.