For the first time I can recall, Krispy Kreme is flaunting two special collections celebrating the same occasion. Are they trying to appeal to a wider audience? Or hedging their bets, offering a ‘traditional’ Yuletide array AND a parallel Grinch-themed collection?
The pastry purveyor – famous or it’s special-occasion ‘festive collections’ – is offerering two very different options for your year-end Holiday feasting. The first is a traditional array of snow-season themes. But the second is a celebration of Dr. Seuss’s infamous Grinch Who Stole Christmas…
A curious approach…
I can’t help but wonder why Krispy Kreme is making the extra effort to roll out two separate Holiday collections. For the first time ever, as far as I can remember. Maybe it’s feeling a little left behind by the massive Year-End-festivity menus being offered by the coffee-and-doughnut competition. Tim Horton’s and Dunkin’s have gone all-out this year with their specials – both food and drinks.
But there is probably a better explanation than that. For more than a decade in the early 2000s, the company experienced a series of ups and downs before coming under the leadership of President & CEO Jim Morgan. Morgan was a noted corporate troubleshooter who was brought in to help KK get back on track after several years of ill fortune and alleged bad management.
Morgan was also well-known as a Christian life advocate: “He addressed an unhealthy culture [at Krispy Kreme] by putting Christ at the center of his approach to business,” the promo blurb for a speaking appearance at Belmont University, a Christian college in Nashville, Tennessee, recorded. “Employees were encouraged to nourish their faith, spend time with family, and serve the community.”
The culture remains
It appears the Morgan ‘culture’, or at least remnants of it, still resonate at KK. And I, for one, am not surprised that that introducing the Suess/Grinch collaboration to appeal to a more mainstream crowd made some folks at KK a touch uncomfortable. After all, the Grinch is really just a loose re-telling of the Charles Dickens classic A Christmas Carol, set in Seuss’s children’s-books universe.
Dickens’ model for The Grinch, crusty old business man Ebenezer Scrooge, starts off as a Christmas hater – summing up his feelings in his infamous dismissal, “Bah! Humbug!” But by the end of the tale, following a dramatic ghostly intervention in which he sees his own death, alone and despised by his community, he’s a convert to the Christmas Spirit, which is based on family and christian values.
A delicate balance
An exploration of the Krispy Kreme website will quickly reveal a company that’s deeply dedicated to community service and Christian values. But it doesn’t go out of its way to say so explicitly.
Unlike Chick-Fil-A, another restaurant chain from the Old South which was founded and remains controlled by a devout Christian family, KK ‘came to the faith’ through Morgan’s influence. But, apparently, as Star Wars fans might say, ‘The Force remains strong.”
So why not make the extra effort to maintain the company’s adherence to basic Christian tenets, while allowing that ‘the Holidays’ mean different things to different people? Not to mention the aforesaid desire to appeal to a broader, secular audience…
My take
Kudos to Krispy Kreme for it’s mature and reasoned approach to the holidays. No critic will ever slam them for commercializing a faith-rooted year-end observance – for putting Mammon before Jehovah, so to speak.
It’s a narrow path, fraught with public-relations and brand-image dangers. But KK is managing to navigate it successfully, even skillfully…
~ Maggie J.