From Dough to Donuts; How Sandy’s Gets Ready for National Donut Day

FARGO, N.D. (KVRR) — On any given day, Sandy’s already makes a lot of donuts. They have three locations across Fargo. They supply various gas stations across the FM metro. They make supply runs every day to parts of North Dakota and Minnesota to deliver their donuts, and National Donut Day has become a big deal. Except for the first time they ended up celebrating National Donut Day. It ended up being a little bit of a surprise to Sandy’s the most.

“I can’t really say when we started doing this for the Salvation Army, or celebrating this, this holiday, said Sandy’s CEO and Co-Owner Jeff Ostlund. “But the first year we found out about it because of our customers. I think the radio or someone had mentioned it and then all of a sudden we just we were just slammed, sold out right away. And we’re like, we don’t even know there was a National Donut day. So then we, you know, we looked into it a little more and figured out what it was all about and how the Salvation Army and the donut curl girl had kind of started that tradition. Average day throughout the year. Make, say, 10,000 donuts a day, probably. This year for National Donut Day, we’re looking at making around 28,000,” said Ostlund.

With so many donuts being sold and handed out on the holiday, it’s all hands on deck. All of Sandy’s over 100 employees are needed to make the donuts and man the stores for a very busy day for them. With over 40 years of donut making experience, they have it down to a science.

Knowing how much dough to have has come with experience over the years. And many of the preparations start well before the first Friday in June.

“A month or so or two months beforehand just making sure we have all the product we need to make sure there’s not any issues. That we have it all figured out that way when we need to order it, we already know. Over the we haven’t had enough of years doing this now that over the years we’ve kind of fine tuned it a little more to do really well at it,” said Ostlund.

Ostlund’s grandpa started the donut company in the early 80’s. Sandy Ostlund is the namesake on the signs and passed away in 2008. Sandy’s has expanded to two new locations during the 2010’s. Sandy’s social media accounts also has tens of thousands of followers. When asked what his grandpa would think seeing how much the company has grown Jeff Ostlund said, “It would be definitely interesting to see the look on my grandpa’s face when we saw how much we grew. I think he would he would definitely love the amount we’ve done with the community and how we and how we’ve grown. I also feel like he might feel kind of weird because, you know, when he was here, we were so much smaller. I mean, he did so much himself. I mean, he would be here frying donuts. He’d be doing the donut count in the office. Like it is such a different place than since when he was here. But also, we still make the same great donuts. The core things that made us successful is what we always plan to keep.”