Seattle Met 329 NE Couch Street, Suite 200 Portland, OR 97232
By Allecia Vermillion Photography by Amber Fouts January 17, 2024 Published in the Spring 2024 issue of Seattle Met cup cake depositor and depositor
These members of Belshaw's management and manufacturing teams have a combined 200-plus years of experience at the company. Left to right: Alan Craker, Jeff Fredrickson, Bobby Morisaki, Stan Dettloff, Satendra Prasad, Erin DeBoer, Chad Dycus, and George Williams.
Down the end of a bland road in Auburn you’ll find a cluster of equally nondescript industrial buildings. And exactly zero clues that you’ve arrived at a place of seismic importance for anyone who consumes doughnuts.
Much of the doughnut-making equipment in the United States, and the doughnut-eating world, originates here, in a factory 20 miles south of the city. The Belshaw company began 101 years ago in a foundry in Seattle, near where Interstate 90 meets Rainier Avenue today. Today all the titans—Dunkin’, Krispy Kreme, Tim Hortons, Hostess, Franz, Entenmann’s, countless supermarkets—rely on Belshaw’s industrial equipment to cut, fry, frost, fill, and glaze millions of raised rings and cake doughnuts. Most of the small operations use their stuff, too.
“Every doughnut shop has probably got something of Belshaw in it,” says Alan Craker, the company’s director of international sales and business development. That’s an astonishing claim for a company that’s all but unknown to the public.
The most visible local clue to Belshaw’s existence might be the Daily Dozen Doughnut Company at Pike Place Market. The stand uses a Belshaw Donut Robot to crank out its endless parade of mini doughnuts. “It’s the most iconic item we make,” says Craker. The robot, first developed for the 1962 World’s Fair, comes in specs ranging from industrial versions to the kiosk-size one at Daily Dozen, where crowds gather to watch doughnuts emerge from a hopper and travel along a conveyor belt in a bath of hot oil.
“I’ve never made doughnuts on anything else,” says Mighty-O Donuts founder Ryan Kellner. He launched his business working festivals with a small Donut Robot in 2000. Today, the company has five shops, a healthy wholesale business, and a cluster of Belshaw’s larger Donut Robots, each one able to make between 44 and 88 dozen doughnuts per hour. Other items in the Belshaw catalog include proofers for yeasted doughnuts, systems to fry and glaze dough that’s frozen, doughnut-specific fryers, even a tumbler that will coat doughnuts in sugar.
Belshaw’s factory looks like your standard machining plant, filled with stacks of sheet metal and bins of parts. Banners overhead celebrate employees’ 25- or 30-year anniversaries, the way high school gymnasiums commemorate state championships. What you don’t often see here are actual doughnuts, though a demo and testing kitchen will whip up a batch maybe a couple times a month. The biggest nod to the company’s wares might be the image of Homer Simpson on a poster about workplace safety.
Belshaw's vintage machines don't look wildly different from what it produces today.
In 1929, Thomas Belshaw, a former mechanic for marine engines, and his brother, Walter, received a patent for their “Sanitary Donut Machine,” a hand-cranked device that involves a hopper full of batter and a plunger that extrudes perfectly uniform cake doughnuts. Depending on the shape of the plunger, the machine can make plain rings, crullers, doughnut holes—even hush puppies.
Today, Belshaw calls its Sanitary Donut Machine a depositer. A 2023 version doesn’t look much different than the original model the company has mounted on a wall in its office, along with old photos and a framed copy of its patent documents. Clearly this isn’t a company that thrives on flash and change—though a second model does include a motor.
Thomas Belshaw’s son and namesake took over the company in the 1960s and expanded it internationally. As business grew over the decades, the depositer added plungers for churros and Greek loukoumades. The version that does mochi rings was originally conceived for the Asian market in the 1950s but proved handy when mochi doughnuts took off in the US in recent years.
President Stan Dettloff has increased the focus on R&D since he took over the role in 2021.
As doughnuts themselves have grown in popularity beyond North America, Belshaw has sent its machines to 120 countries, from Saudi Arabia to Tanzania. Their bigger systems often carry a Seattle connection: when Belshaw wants to launch, say, a new industrial-scale cabinet proofer, it often tests products with local customers, like Top Pot Doughnuts, before they go forth into the world.
Other doughnut equipment companies have materialized over the past 40 years, but Belshaw retains a major market share. Craker speculates it’s because they make equipment that is incredibly specialized, and, for as popular as they are, doughnuts still hold just a tiny share of the overall baking market: “Compared with bread, it’s a minuscule amount.”
After decades of private ownership, Belshaw went through a few owners and a merger with breadmaking equipment company Adamatic. In 2007, a Milan-based company, the Ali Group, bought the business. Being an old company, making long-lasting equipment with few competitors is enviable in many ways, says Craker. “But that came with a downside: “We didn’t really innovate.”
Another unusual thing about Belshaw: this degree of candor. “I don’t sugarcoat things,” says Craker. But he’ll sell you a machine that does.
donut sheeter cutter 01/16/2024 By Allecia Vermillion Photography by Amber Fouts