Jeff Houck

The Tampa Tribune’s food writer since 2005, Jeff Houck covers the way people live through their food. He also hosts the Table Conversations food podcast and believes that everything crunchy is good.

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It’s Time To Change The Doughnuts [New Ideas Brewing At Dunkin’ Donuts]

Posted Aug 26, 2010 by Jeff Houck

Updated Aug 26, 2010 at 04:28 PM

From a customer’s vantage point, it might seem that running a doughnut franchise would be unwavering.

You make the doughnuts and coffee. People buy them. You make more tomorrow. Repeat.

Not so, says Dunkin’ Donuts CEO Nigel Travis. It takes more than that to adapt to the changing conditions of the economy, the growth in technology and the shifts in customer behaviors and tastes.

Case in point: The company’s franchise store on Fourth Street North. Two years ago, it broke ground on its first “green” restaurant.

Travis visited on Wednesday from Boston to congratulate franchise owner Robert Aziz for earning a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certification from the U.S. Green Business Council. The ceremony was attended by St. Petersburg Mayor Bill Foster and city councilmen Bill Dudley and Karl Nurse.

The store’s green savvy included switching from Styrofoam to paper coffee cups and composting more than 50,000 pounds of used coffee grounds since opening in 2008. Electricity costs alone have dropped 25 percent to 40 percent due to construction techniques that blended concrete and foam.

Aziz on Wednesday announced a second green Dunkin’ Donuts will open in 2011 at Fourth Street North and 11th Avenue North. The new store is to have solar panels and a wind turbine to power customers’ laptops, cell phones and hybrid cars.

Aziz’s initiative prompted the company to hire a full-time corporate-level director to guide other owners toward more environmentally friendly and cost-efficient practices, Travis said.

“If we are to grow and get more stores, we need franchisees to have a great bottom line. They need to be highly profitable and (operating green stores) is a real contribution to that profitability.”

On the food side, Travis (pictured at right) said the company has done well with tweaks of its menu, including the four flavors of bagel twists introduced recently.

The beverage segment also continues to grow. A playful experiment by franchise owners who mixed flavors of their slushy Coolatta produced a “Mixology” promotion this summer that urged customers to mix their own. In Boston, Dunkin’ added a Green Monster Coolatta (a mix of blue raspberry and Tropicana orange flavors) to its summer beverage lineup.

“It really demonstrates the flexibility of our products,” Travis said. “We learn all that from our franchisees.”

Another change: Dunkin’ is employing technology to push growth during the afternoon and evening. The company is urging franchisees to offer free wireless Internet access to lure in mobile business people.

A Fort Lauderdale store recently opened with two conference rooms available for rent, as well as computers, printers and Wii game stations. The rationale is that if the company can tap into customer behavior patterns, the sales will follow.

“To get people to migrate from predominantly breakfast to later in the day is something we have to work hard at,” Travis said. “I’m a big believer that technology has a role to play.”

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Table Conversations: Nigel Travis (Podcast)