A Former Employee Explains What Happens To Leftover Krispy Kreme Donuts

Krispy Kreme is mostly known for its delicious Original Glazed donuts, and if you can get a hot, freshly made one right off the line it's almost transcendent. Easily one of the best donuts you'll ever try. But the chain is also known for something a little less savory, persistent accusations of food waste. For years now, Krispy Kreme has been called out for trashing massive amounts of donuts. As far back as 2016, the BBC reported on a customer spotting about 50 bags of 200 donuts each in the trash behind one location in Bristol. Instagrammer Bewzerk posted photos of dumpsters full of still-packaged Krispy Kreme donuts in 2025. In 2026, a video posted by Barstoolsports showed a dumpster of loose donuts outside of another location. Plenty of videos from many other users show more of the same. While the videos and articles look bad, there has been little input from the company.

Tasting Table reached out to Krispy Kreme to get its response. "As a fresh doughnut business, we work to minimize food waste through initiatives that include donating unsold doughnuts to local food banks, repurposing food waste into animal feed, and offering end-of-day doughnuts at a discount," the company told us. "We continue to expand these efforts and explore new ways to reduce waste across our operations."

This response sounds good and aligns with what chains like McDonald's do with food waste. It speaks to all the concerns people have with waste. That said, I worked at Krispy Kreme about 20 years ago, and things don't seem to have changed despite the corporate response.

In 2016, Krispy Kreme attributed the issue with donuts in the trash to a temporary problem with its recycling process. The UK website currently states that unsold donuts are turned into animal feed and bio-fuel. However, when I worked there, employees routinely threw out all the donuts at the end of the day. In fact, we brought in extra donuts to throw out. 

The location where I worked made donuts for local Walmarts and McDonald's to be sold in stores, a partnership that still pops up sometimes. As part of this deal, we would take back any unsold donuts at the end of the day. Every shift at closing, a truck would show up full of boxes of donuts and toss them directly into the dumpster. Combined with what was unsold from our store, this totaled several hundred donuts a day. No effort was made to donate, repurpose, or even discount them. The store allowed employees to have a dozen free donuts per week, plus a free donut on breaks. However, anything left at the end of a shift was off limits, and we could face discipline for taking them. One coworker who had set aside two broken cake donuts destined for the trash was accused of theft.

My store ended up closing after a couple of years. I routinely saw my manager have breakdowns in the back storage room, karate-kicking bags of flour and freaking out because the location was losing money. If the statement from Krispy Kreme truly reflects what it's doing now, then that is progress that would help people who could benefit from the food, as well as the company itself. Might even convince to try a donut again, after avoiding them for two decades.