WEST JORDAN — Every day, Utah companies supply the marketplace with all sorts of popular brand name goods: firearms from Browning, cheese from Cache Valley, suits from Mr. Mac, headphones from Skullcandy, coal from Carbon County, and oil from Vernal.
The list goes on.
But few products, and maybe not any, can boast of the staying power and popularity of a 4-ounce piece of dough made daily on the outskirts of West Jordan.
The Dunford Bakers chocolate-iced chocolate doughnut.
How popular is it? Each morning around 4 a.m., as regular as the sunrise, 365 days a year, huge doughnut fryers start up at the big 10,000-square-foot Dunford bakery in West Jordan. By the time they’re finished they’ve made 30,000 chocolate doughnuts.
By the time the day’s done, almost all of them have disappeared.
It’s Utah’s perfect perishable product. A perpetual delight. Every day the clock starts over.
That’s 12 million doughnuts a year. Give or take.
At that, the chocolate-iced doughnut isn't the product that put Dunford Bakers on the map. The company first made its mark more than 80 years ago when it started selling loaves of bread door to door during the Depression. It all began in 1931 when the school district laid off a home economics teacher named Hazel Dunford. The jobless woman still had to feed her family. Desperate times called for desperate action. She turned on the oven at home as soon as the sun rose and sent her young boys off on their bicycles to sell her bread in the neighborhood.
Besides being a first-rate survivor, Mrs. Dunford was a darned good baker. People lined up for her bread, and the company that bears her name is still going strong.
The three original Dunford boys, Burns, Clayton and Steve, eventually departed from the business. The closest remaining link to the original management team is John Stevens, whose father, Paul, owned Royal Baking Co. and merged with the Dunfords not long after Hazel got the family business going. John remains president to this day, while another longtime employee, Gary Gottfredson, who came on as a salesman more than 40 years ago, is second in longevity.
The two oversee the massive daily operation, all of it permeated by the flavor of chocolate icing.
From the start, the chocolate-iced doughnuts were part of the product line — to this day, Dunford bread remains by far the biggest seller — but it wasn’t until 1973, just as the convenience store concept was beginning to grab the American public, when everything ramped up for the doughnut. That’s when Utah’s coalition of 7-Eleven stores contacted Dunford about buying its doughnuts and pastries in bulk on a daily basis.
The floodgates opened. Other grocery stores and merchants, taking note of the popularity of 7-Eleven’s new line of doughnuts, placed their orders as well (these days, Utah’s 145 7-Elevens routinely get 5,000 chocolate doughnuts a day, in addition to fritters, maple bars, pumpkin cookies and other Dunford varieties; the chocolate doughnuts outsell the rest by 4- or 5-to-1).
The rush has never stopped rushing.
Enes Kanter probably even liked them.
If you asked the people at Dunford how many stories they’ve heard over the years about chocolate-iced doughnut fanatics, they’d have no way to give you a count.
“People just rant and rave,” says Stevens. “We get calls from all over to ship them out of state, to missionaries and others. But it’s not a good idea to send them fresh. They’ll fall to crumbs. You need to use dry ice.”
One well-publicized Dunford doughnut nut is the comedian Roseanne Barr, who grew up in Utah (East High School) and is not noted for having a lot good to say about her home state. With one exception.
“They’re the greatest invention of modern humanity,” she once said of Dunford chocolate-iced doughnuts. “I always try to get my mom to send them to me, but they don’t keep. Sometimes I feel like flying into Utah just to get some myself.”
Several years ago at a book-signing event at Sam Weller’s, Stevens showed up and personally presented Roseanne with a box of fresh doughnuts.
“Least we could do,” he said. “She said she’d like to be dunked in a vat of the chocolate syrup.”
And so it goes. Days come, days go, the Dunford chocolate-iced doughnut phenomenon remains. As Roseanne also said, “The rest of the world could really learn something about doughnuts from Utah.”
Lee Benson's About Utah column runs Mondays. Email: benson@deseretnews.com