No, Dunkin' Didn't Invent Donut Holes. Here's Who Did.

Dunkin' began selling Munchkins Donut Hole Treats in the 1970s and recently celebrated 50 years of Dunkin' Munchkins. The chain's tasty donut holes are so popular that around 800 million are sold each year, and they are available in six standard flavors as well as seasonal varieties like the Pumpkin Munchkin. Perhaps because of their popularity, you might think that Dunkin' invented the donut hole.

Those familiar with the sweet history of Dunkin's beloved Munchkins know that the brand says it invented their bite-sized treats when they realized that the excess dough cut from the center of their standard donuts was being wasted. However, there is another story that has been circulating for decades: A ship captain from New England named Hanson Gregory is responsible for the creation of the donut hole, as he altered his mother's donut recipe by cutting the first ever hole in a donut. What he did with the dough he removed, we may never know. With National Donut Day on June 6, it's time to get to the bottom of who invented the donut hole.

In order to better understand the origin of donut holes, we first have to consider the history of donuts. Different cultures have been frying balls of dough for hundreds of years. Starting in the 17th century, Dutch settlers brought a doughy confection called Dutch oliekoeken to the colony of New Netherland (covering modern-day New York and much of the northeast). Also called oily cakes, they weren't just round pieces of dough; depending on the baker, some were cut into other shapes, like stars or diamonds. But the one thing that all of these donuts had in common was that they had no center hole.

Many years later, American soldiers fighting in France during World War I were given donuts and consequently came home craving the satisfying fried treats. By 1920, a Russian immigrant in New York City named Adolph Levitt invented an innovative machine that helped donuts become a sensation, calling it the Wonderful Almost Human Automatic Doughnut Machine. This device created rings of dough, dropped them into a vat of oil to fry them, and then ejected them onto a conveyor belt where they would be coated in sugar or glaze. While these donuts had holes, they were formed into rings rather than having a hole of dough cut out of them.

According to Gregory, he created a hole in one of his mother's donuts using a round pepper container. Or maybe he stuck a donut on the spoke of his ship's wheel so that he could steer with both hands through a storm, as one popular story says. According to Dunkin', it invented the donut hole as a way to avoid wasting dough. While either tale could be true, it could also just be that the invention of donut holes is yet another murky and mysterious food origin story.

What we can say is that even if Gregory punched a hole in a donut 175 years ago, there is no evidence to suggest that he kept or ate the hole. There is also no proof that he or his mother went on to figure out how to make donut holes independently. That honor seems to belong wholly to Dunkin'.