Krispy Kreme Debuts a Coffee-Flavored Doughnut on National Coffee Day, and the Internet Is Asking Why

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Krispy Kreme, on the eve of National Coffee Day, is selling a doughnut that tastes like coffee, and the country, which has for more than a century eaten coffee-flavored doughnuts with coffee and called the pairing “the thing,” is now being asked to eat the coffee-flavored doughnut with the coffee and be told, in a press release from the company, that they are “bringing together two of the most irresistible pairings: coffee and doughnuts.”

The Original Glazed Coffee Flavored Doughnut, available for a limited window that begins this weekend and runs through Tuesday’s National Coffee Day, is, in the company’s own description, a doughnut that brings coffee and doughnuts together. The question, the one that has been circulating among the people who have been eating doughnuts for longer than the company has existed, is what, exactly, the doughnut is now for.

It is not for the pairing, because the pairing is now the doughnut. It is not for the coffee, because the coffee is now the doughnut. It is, in the estimation of the people who have ordered one, for the specific moment in which you bite into a glazed ring and taste, not the coffee you are drinking, but the coffee you are about to forget was a beverage.

"The coffee you are about to forget was a beverage."

Patrons interviewed outside a store this morning offered the full range of responses a nation has for a product like this. A woman in her forties, holding a coffee and a coffee-flavored doughnut at the same time, said she had “not even noticed” the overlap, which is the response of someone who orders the same thing every day and has, until today, never once considered that the two items were, in a sense, the same item. A man in his twenties, who ordered the coffee-flavored doughnut and then, when handed his black coffee, set it down and said “do I even need this,” said he was “here to represent the question.” A high school kid, asked what he thought, said “the doughnut tastes like the coffee,” paused, and said “wait, that’s not funny, that’s just the point,” which is, in the assessment of the reporter standing next to him, the most honest sentence spoken about this product to date.

The gastroenterologist on record, a specialist in the effects of coffee on the body, was asked how a coffee-flavored doughnut and a coffee interact in the stomach, and said, on the record, “they are both coffee,” which is the medical answer to the question, and then said, off the record, that he was “not drinking a coffee right now, I just want to get out of here,” which is the human answer.

At press time, the doughnut was on sale in stores across the country, the coffee was in the cup next to it, and the two of them were sitting on a tray together, which is, as the company said in its release, “the most irresistible pairing,” and as the patron in her forties said, while finishing both, “the thing.”