America runs on Dunkin’s best-kept secrets.
A former Dunkin’ employee has gone viral on TikTok for dishing all the unknown details about the coffee company, including where they get their beloved donuts and why they notoriously taste different at every location.
Amir Mohamed oversees the operations of service at a Dunkin’ location in California and has been doing so for eight years.
The 29-year-old employee from Beverly Hills revealed in a TikTok video that has garnered 77,600 likes that every store has three different options on how to get their donuts, explaining why sometimes taste and texture varies in different stores.
“You can a) bake them yourself in your own kitchen inside the restaurant, you can have them delivered from a central kitchen that you and other franchisee’s team up to build, which is called a CML, or you could order JBOD donuts, which are like disgusting frozen donuts,” he explained. “Don’t do that.”
Mohamed explained that for the first 12 years of operation, the donuts were made fresh in-house every single night, but it was just too much.
“It was an absolute mad house of an operation. Cooking 100s and 100s of donuts, it was a lot,” Mohamed shared. “Eventually, we switched to CML and teamed up with a bunch of other franchisees. Like 30 of us built a central kitchen where the donuts are still baked fresh every single night and shipped out to us early in the morning before we open.”
“Personally, I loved when we made them in house because I felt like the donuts were bigger, everything was filled better and tasted better. But sometimes it becomes too much, so we switched to a CML,” he added.
He explained in a follow-up video that JBOD donuts are shipped to the store while frozen and reheated before serving, adding that while they’re supposed to taste the same, he thinks it’s easy to tell the difference since the JBOD donuts are a little smaller and more dense.
Mohamed also shared that there is a valid reason as to why Dunkin’ throws out their donuts rather than donating them. The store he specifically works at tried to donate at first, but it ended up becoming a “liability.”
“The problem was, the food bank was storing these donuts for extensive periods of time, they were keeping them for six or seven days and they started to decompose and get moldy,” he explained in another video.
“It was just creating a huge liability and we didn’t want to get people sick so we had to resort to throwing them out.”
He went on to say that the donuts have a maximum one-day, 24-hour shelf life — though they try not to even keep them for 24 hours and instead sell them all to minimize waste.