AN ODE TO DUNKIN’S SUGAR RAISED: THE SILENT DISAPPEARANCE OF A STAPLE

 

It’s no McRib in that in Dr. Frankenstein’s of the food corporate world resurrect it annually nor is it the Choco Taco that went away with much fanfare leaving behind more than a few broken hearts. No, Dunkin’s sugar raised donut became a beloved item by embracing simplicity.

How best to describe it? It’s not hard. Think of the glazed donut with the sugar used on the jelly donut. That was all it was and that was all it needed to be. It was the perfect offering for when you just wanted a simple donut with added sugar.

Looking back, my favorite donut said a lot about me as a child. My palette for dessert was simple. Soda was generally not brought into my home, I only ever saw Coke or Pepsi in our fridge when my parents were expecting company, and fast food was a rarity. No wonder I never developed a throbbing sweet tooth. Nonetheless, Dunkin Donuts was a frequent stop for my father who needed his caffeine before heading out to the construction site. I still recall our little in-joke when he would send me in to buy him his coffee. “Cream-no-sugar” became our code for Dunkin Donuts’s coffee once I memorized the way he liked it. And whenever a stop at Dunkin Donuts was announced, there was only one donut I asked for, the sugar raised. It just hit the spot, just right.

And then, at some point, I couldn’t even tell you when exactly, the sugar raised began disappearing from the donut shelves. Its discontinuation was never announced and rumors persist that it is still around in those elusive “specific locations”. In my search for reliving (albeit on a much smaller scale; that little circle of calories can do more damage to me at 43 than it did at 5) I stumbled into a rabbit-hole of Dunkin methods that partially explains what happened to the sugar raised.

You see, there is a list of required donuts that each Dunkin (franchised or otherwise) must stock each day. The rest is at the discretion of the manager and it is often based on local tastes. Through this method, Dunkin gradually spurred the disappearance of the lemon donut as well as one I always liked, the butternut. And this too, likely, spelled the disappearance of the sugar raised.

I guess less people liked it than I thought or maybe it was simply too plain to compete against the sugary richness of maple frosted or Boston crème. There are other companies that make their own version of the sugar donut but Dunkin’s sugar raised was an unparalleled bit of perfection in simplicity, the literal sweet spot in sugar for the kid that didn’t need an overkill of cream or jelly squirting out of the dough.

In my adult life I’ve come to frequent on Dunkin’s for my own caffeine fuel and through the years I’ve seen there menu change (they even dropped “Donuts” from their name in 2019 to emphasize their greater variety of offerings) and I do have my go-to selections. Still, the sugar raised formed my earliest memories of Dunkin Donuts and, if internet stories are true, in some magenta and orange donut shop somewhere they are waiting for a revival.