8days.sg Exclusive: We Fly To The Mister Donut College In Osaka To See How New Employees Are Trained, & It Involves Exams

Japanese ‘chorei’

Curious about the unusual ‘tok tok’ sound, normally heard in a temple and not an office, we ask a Duskin staff about its source. We are told that a group of employees is holding their daily “gratitude session” known as chorei. These brief morning meetings, unique to Japanese business culture, start everyone’s work day on the right note by reinforcing company values and coordinating agendas.

8days.sg tours Mister Donut College

There are now 978 Misdo outlets across Japan. Charmingly enough, there is also a ‘Mister Donut College’ — yes, that’s its official name — located within Duskin’s HQ to train new employees. Carved on a wooden plaque at the entrance is the tagline: “All that count originates here”.

8days.sg was invited on an exclusive tour of the college, ahead of the opening of Mister Donut’s first Singapore franchised outlet on May 21.

The permanent takeaway store at Bishan’s Junction 8 mall comes after a successful market test by Japanese restaurants Kuriya and Ichiban Boshi's parent company RE&S, which saw Mister Donut fans queue for a whopping three hours for doughnuts at the Jurong Point pop-up last July.

Staff training 

Our own agenda for the day: Observe how Mister Donut trains their team of Singapore staff for the upcoming Bishan outlet. A total of six sales staff and two management staff flew to Osaka for a two-week training course at the college, which is best described as an intensive doughnut school.

Due to trade sensitivity, access to the Harvard of doughnuts is strictly restricted to only staff and visitors with special clearance. But a Duskin Museum with a dine-in Misdo cafe is open to the public. It is free admission, and you can make a reservation online to try a doughnut-making class yourself (it costs around 600 yen, or S$6, per person).

Mr Winokur Room

The bulk of the training takes place on a sprawling floor within the building, where there is a prepping room for washing up and putting on aprons and hairnets. The industrial kitchen is adorably named ‘Mr Winokur Room’ after Mister Donut’s founder Harry Winokur, who, incidentally, is the brother-in-law of Dunkin’ Donuts creator William Rosenberg.

Mock-up shop

There is a functional mock-up of an actual Mister Donut shop, complete with a dine-in area. Here, the trainees can practise how to operate in the real-life store and serve customers. As each trainee exits the room, they are also expected to turn and bow — even if the room is empty — as a sign of respect. The Singapore Mister Donut team don blue uniforms, though the company also offers franchisees a brown colourway option.

3-hour wait for doughnuts

Now, some folks may remember that the queue at Mister Donut’s Jurong Point pop-up was three hours because the staff could barely make doughnuts fast enough to keep up with the insatiable demand.

What some people do with 60 pon de rings is a mystery (as we have seen more than a few customers buying). But at Mister Donut College, we learn why there was such a wait. While some of the menu items are factory-produced, the chain’s most popular items, like the garland-shaped Pon de Ring, French Cruller and Old Fashion doughnuts, are made fresh on-site by a kitchen crew. All doughnuts are fried at the store.

And all that work takes time, as we will detail below:

Firing doughnuts into a vat of hot oil

During their stint in Osaka, the Singapore team are taught by Japanese trainers on how to make various doughnuts from scratch. The batters — all company secret recipes — are prepared according to specific measurements and loaded into special dispenser machines.

Take for example the French cruller, which we observe a trainee staff making. The batter is piped through a funnel that gives the cruller its pretty spiral shape, and plopped into a vat of hot oil.

Rambo would excel at this

Now comes the challenging part for the trainee: Hold the machine steady and start firing raw crullers into hot oil at an even speed, rate and size.

It is like an arcade game that is much more difficult than it looks; you have to manually crank out a very precise amount of batter for each doughnut so that they are the same size, and do it fast enough so that the batch of crullers can finish frying at the same time.

Oh, and let’s play in Hard Mode because you also have to space out the crullers while dispensing so the sticky rings don’t bump into one another, then speedily flip them so that each side can cook evenly. Let’s say if there is a Misdo reality doughnut-making competition, we would watch it. A lot of skills and concentration goes into making a box of treats.

Doughnut-making exam

At the end of their course, the trainees have to take an exam to graduate. This consists of what we call the Doughnut Challenge — making items like crullers perfectly within a stipulated amount of time, which Duskin has declined to reveal. But we know for a fact that it is no amateur hour.

Once the crullers are fried to a golden yellow, the trainee will have to quickly fish all of them out with a rod and glaze the entire row evenly by lowering them into a dip. If there is any doughnut that turns out wonky, well, one will just have to retake the exam until they get it right. Is anyone having flashbacks to repeating school modules at this point?

What to expect at the Singapore store

The Mister Donut outlet in Bishan officially opens on May 21, but RE&S &Rewards members get early access on May 20, including a 10-piece box set at $23 (limited to one per pax; 300 boxes available).

You can’t choose the flavours for this box, though. Each box comes with two each of Pon de Ring, Pon de Ring Strawberry, one each of Chocolate Old Fashion, French Cruller, cream-stuffed cruller Angel French, Sugar Raised, and a Singapore-exclusive flavour, a Strawberry Chocolate doughnut ring.

But from May 21, the doughnuts are available a la carte at $2.30 to $2.50 a piece, half a dozen for $14, or 10 for $23. There are 20 flavours available, including another local exclusive chocolate-dipped Pon de Ring. Each customer can buy a maximum of 10 doughnuts, so hopefully you don’t have to queue for three hours this time.

Mister Donut Singapore opens May 21 at #02-27A Junction 8, 9 Bishan Place, S579837. May 20 early access for RE&S &Rewards members. More updates via Instagram. 

Photos: Yip Jieying

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