At Curiosity Doughnuts, our cruller has developed a devoted audience. The cruller is glazed with our vanilla buttermilk glaze. One day I changed the glaze to our buttermilk lime. Chaos followed. I couldn’t understand why until I realized that changing the existing, the familiar, the expected for our audience led to disappointment.
When we were at Inferno, there were no expectations of what our crullers were. It allowed us to start with a clean slate, and we took advantage of the opportunity. We made our original buttermilk crullers and added blood orange, blackberry, and passion fruit. These new flavors were accents on the base vanilla glazed crullers. These flavored crullers sold quickly and were well received.
The response rekindled my desire and drive to mess with our original. Over the weekend, we kept our original glazed crullers, reintroduced the passion fruit (a flavor we tried once previously at the shop), and a new adaptation: a blackberry lime. The new flavors took off. I’m not sure exactly why; perhaps because we had the vanilla cruller our devoted audience desired. By having the options, we opened doors we couldn’t see before.
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