Spudnut Shops
American franchised stores
Spudnut Shops were American franchised stores selling donuts made with potato flour called Spudnuts. The original recipe is based on a folk recipe that traces back to Germany.
The company was founded in 1940 and had 315 franchise stores by 1968. The parent company no longer exists, but some independent stores remain.
History
After brothers Al and Bob Pelton of Salt Lake City ate potato-based doughnuts in Germany, they tried a number of things, from wheat dough that was flavored with potato water to using mashed potatoes, before creating a dry potato mix that not only worked for them but made it possible to franchise the concept. They coined the word "spudnut", and went into business in 1940.
In 1946, the company began establishing a nationwide chain of franchised Spudnut Shops. In 1948, one new franchisee opened a store after paying $50 (approx. $1,095 in 2024 dollars) plus the cost of 100 sacks of spudnut flour. By 1952, when the Peltons were on the cover of the April 1952 edition of Mechanix Illustrated (“Their Potatoes Make Dough”), a franchise cost $1,750, plus equipment and other costs, for an initial investment of about $5,000 (approx.
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This entry incorporates text from “Spudnut Shops” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.