click to enlarge - Jordan Adams
- Ron Roberge Jr. passing on his skills
The smells of frying oil and cinnamon flooded my nostrils as I entered a large private garage in Colchester. Smell is said to be the most powerful of the senses, and on that recent Sunday morning, the wafting scent of fried goodness overpowered the bright sunshine and the boisterous chatter of 50 or so people in the echoing space.
My attention was completely focused on the mass creation of one of my favorite treats: the locally famous Koffee Kup Bakery cinnamon-sugar cruller. The garage contained an assembly line on which members of the Vermont family that founded the company were at work churning out pastries in preposterous quantities.
The doughnut-making party is a semi-regular tradition that patriarch Ron Roberge and his wife, Carol, throw for family, friends and former employees. So what was a freelance journalist doing in the mix?
Let me back up.
In May 2021, about 10 years after the founding family sold Koffee Kup Bakery "in a quiet sale ... to a company we believed would carry on the tradition," Roberge wrote by email, the company's factories in Burlington, Brattleboro and Connecticut closed abruptly.
- Jordan Adams
- Guests enjoying Doughnut Day
I dashed around Burlington panic-buying as many Koffee Kup crullers (and doughnuts and hamburger buns) as I could find and reasonably fit in my freezer. I savored the stash for the better part of a year, finishing my last cruller in April 2022, when I chronicled my reaction in a short piece for this paper.
My story caught the attention of Roberge and co., who extended an invitation to join them at the next Doughnut Day party. Like I was going to pass up free doughnuts — especially my favorite doughnuts in the entire world.
"It's growing — it started small," Laurie Roberge-Houle, Ron Roberge's daughter, said of the party.
Roberge-Houle, who served the company for more than 20 years as a doughnut producer, packager and office worker, pointed out other family members hard at work on the assembly line. They mixed dough, twisted it for crullers, cut it into doughnuts, dropped it in boiling Crisco and dredged the final products in cinnamon-sugar. Trays at both ends of the line were continuously populated with fresh doughnuts — some plain, some just sugared, some with cinnamon. Party guests feasted to their hearts' content.
Roberge was far too busy overseeing the operation to chat during the event. "He's making sure they do it right," attendee Jeanette Bishop quipped.
click to enlarge - Jordan Adams
- Koffee Kup-style crullers and doughnuts
"The groundswell of love and support that spread was heartwarming at the time [the factory closed]," Roberge said via email after the party. "We heard so many voices of people ... who loved our products, and [had] so much nostalgia for the tradition."
Though Roberge has been retired from bakery life for a decade, Doughnut Day is a way for him and his family to keep the company's values alive.
"The main thing is the family atmosphere ... the bonding ... feeling like everyone has your back," Roberge-Houle said.
Francis Comstock, a longtime Koffee Kup employee who came and went over the years, told me — as I sipped coffee and munched on a cruller — that the Roberge family was the reason he kept going back.
"They all seem to have that caring about the people who work for them that you don't see at a lot of companies," Comstock said. Now employed at a convenience store, he said customers still ask about Koffee Kup products — and their absence from the shelves.
Crullers were not absent from my freezer after my visit to the Roberge family compound. I left before they broke down the assembly line, but they sent me home with a full bag. I can't say I've been as judicious with my consumption this time as I was in 2021. Of the dozen I took, I have four left.